When City Councilor David Giffel recently raised the issue of rising trash removal costs, he asked why Fishers does not have a contract with one trash firm to save residents money. The Town of Fishers investigated this 10 years ago, took bids and had a low bidder.
However, at that time, local residents were loud and clear that they did not want the Town of Fishers to take over the trash removal system, even under a contract with a private company. Basically, residents told the Town Council they don’t want government intervening in how their trash was collected.
Let’s just say things are different now. With Waste Management’s purchase of Ray’s, as I understand it, there are only two trash removal operations offering service in Fishers…Waste Management and Republic.
After recording podcast interviews with all but one City Council candidate, Mike Fassold asked the question of what the candidates were hearing in their door-to-door campaigning. A number of them said the cost of trash removal and the quality of service were a subject with residents before Councilor Giffel publicly asked about this.
It should be noted that two current City Council members, Pete Peterson and John Weingardt, were on the Town Council when the trash issue was investigated 10 years ago. Current Mayor Scott Fadness was the Town Manager.
Only one councilor has gone on the record to oppose a city contract with one trash firm…Brad DeReamer.
The next step is for the mayor to have a work session with the Council explaining steps that must be taken to just begin the process of accepting bids on a city-wide trash collection contract. Will the rising cost of trash collection result in a different public reaction this time around? We will soon find out.
Is that something that could be put on a voting referendum? Seems like that would save a lot of time and money.
I do not believe Indiana law has a provision for a binding referendum on this issue, but I welcome comments from anyone with a different view.
Our HOA had a neighborhood deal with Rays that took our trash rate to just a third of what we were paying for Republic for the exact same service. Now that Waste Management bought Rays, our HOA told us that Waste Management does not do contracts and thus the contract we had with Rays was no longer valid. Since then, our cost with Waste Management almost doubled from what we were paying for Rays. Count me on board for exploring a city contract for trash pickup.
I’m so glad this has come up! Back when we had Ray’s, I felt pretty attached to using them because they had some truly great service. Now we’re stuck with just two companies neither of which give good or reliable service (but WM is especially bad). Since WM started picking up in our neighborhood, the street has been littered with glass from their dumper missing the top of their truck with the recycling.
It seems like it would be interesting to consider some kind of consolidated drop off as well. We tend to only have a single bag of trash per week and our neighbor has even less; it would be nice to have a place we could pay a super reduced rate to drop off at so we don’t even need to pay for curbside.
Rays had really great service. And price. Our rates didn’t change much over the 15 years we used them. WM has already raised our rate by $10 since they bought Rays.
Those of us with mature trees in our yards have issues with leaf disposal during fall. Rays would pick up our bagged leaves, WM refuses to pick up any material outside the trash cart.
Why does Fishers not have a leaf collection service during fall while Noblesville and Indianapolis both do? It would be a good way to use all these leaves for compost at the Fishers AgriPark.
That was dumb not to explore a citywide collection. I am glad that they are looking at this again. Our Republic collection bill has gone from $40 to $59 per quarter. They had raised it higher ($65), but I talked them down. There is no reason that Fishers couldn’t negotiate a great rate with Republic or Waste Management and bill us with our sewer bills.
We switched to republic and our bill dropped from $84 with Waste many to $36 quarterly with Republic.
Just want to say I LOVE the headline Larry, nice play on words. 🙂