County switches rural trash service

Story by Shannon Taylor, Senior Investigative Reporter

The Public Works Committee voted to switch the rural trash service from Republic Services to RaeKar.

County Mayor Jake Bynum said that this was the year that they were set to take bids for the Rural Solid Waste Disposal franchise. “We had an entity that expressed some interest that the franchise does not expire with Republic until the end of the year but we have about 3500 hundred customers on the rural trash pick-up so we thought it would be in the best interest of everybody involved to go ahead and bid that out so if there was a change it would give the new provider time so they would be ready to go on that Jan 1 start date.”

RaeKar is based primarily out of Waynesboro and was also the cheapest of the two bids, both in the regular rate and the senior rate, with a smaller percentage increase yearly. Their landfill is located in Troy and they have a station in Martin. This will be one of RaeKar’s first rural trash pickup customers, according to Bynum. This also does not have to go before the full County Commission, Bynum said they would just take the County’s recommendation on this. There is also no cost the county for this.

Bynum said, “All we do is offer a franchise to come into the county. We don’t require mandatory rural trash pickup and I think that’s a really good policy on our part. If you look to our neighbors in Carroll County, they do require mandatory rural trash pickup, so the county facilitates some of that and they make a little revenue off of that. The reason we offer the franchise is that you all know in nearly every discussion we have about rural issues is that there are parts of the county that are far more challenging to provide service so very un-densely populated areas don’t make a lot of costs, or profits for these companies so the franchise says that you have to cover everybody and you have to pick up everybody that signs up for your service. If we opened it up for everybody, you would start to see these companies pick off the profit centers.”

Commissioner Dennis Doster stated that he had some drawbacks because “we would be the first.” Doster said they were unexperienced in the rural part of it and the service we have now had some problems during COVID, but that had gotten straightened out. Bynum agreed that the number of complaints have reduced and that there was a potential that was because they knew that the County was going out for bids and customer service oftentimes increases due to that fact. “We have had a better relationship with Republic in the last six months than we had previously.” Bynum said it’s now more of an economic question.

Doster voted against going with RaeKar.

In other business, the committee voted for the County to maintain the Old Highway 45/State Route 43 from Sharon city limits to the four-lane by Sheldon’s. This was approved unanimously and will go before the County Commission in May.