A Waste?

In 2013, we had garbage and/or recycling trucks on the road five days a week.  I don't remember what we were paying, but despite paying our Village PW sanitation employees less than poverty-level wages, we were paying somewhere, I think, in the $500s per residential unit per year.  It was never explained why Village PW employees who were being underpaid weren't complaining, but we had to do something.  We had three garbage trucks, one of which was inoperable and not salvageable, and another of which was intermittent, and held together with spit and scotch tape, and employees who were not reliable to come to work, pulling other PW employees off other Village responsibilities, and whatever we could do to keep this "system" working was going to cost a good deal of money.  We were going to have to buy new trucks (even the most consistently reliable one was old and leaking), and hire more employees, and, if we cared about our own employees, we were going to have to pay them more.  The loose estimate at the time was that we would wind up paying in the $700s or more per residential unit.

So in 2014, we outsourced.  We were careful to find what we thought was the best outsource contractor, and one of our requirements was that they agree to offer full time jobs to all of our current employees.  Which they did.  And which would have been for higher wages.  And which, inexplicably, none of our PW sanitation employees accepted.  But we wound up with trucks on our roads three days a week, instead of five, and we were paying in the low $400s per residential unit.  And we restabilized our PW department.

Except some Village residents were bereft, and complained, and once we hit 2017, and the then Commission didn't care about anything, including trying to improve service, it deteriorated.  And once the contract with that contractor ended, and the then Commission still didn't care about anything, we just started with contract extensions, each for more money than the last.

We reached about $485 per residential unit, with deteriorating service, and no one to work with/on our contractor, so the newest Commission and manager decided to find someone else.  That someone else is Great Waste and Recycling Service.  They started at the beginning of last month.

So now, we're up to four days a week of trucks on the roads, and $659.49 per residential unit.  That's $178 per unit more than we were paying before July 1 of this year.  A residential unit is your single family house, or each side of a duplex, or each apartment in an apartment building.

We appear to have undone more or less all the good we did in 2014, and increased prices very considerably.