The Pine Bluff City Council is on track to consider on Monday a new five-year contract with Waste Management Inc., which handles the city’s garbage and waste pickup. The current contract expires at the end of this month. So while we understand the urgency in getting this done quickly, we recommend the city tap the brakes and allow this new contract to breathe a bit and let everyone have a say.
First off, thank you to the 12-member panel of city officials who negotiated the agreement. That sounds like a lot of work, and you are to be commended for the effort.
Their document, however, should be a draft that then gets a good going over by all members of the council and residents. As we noted, this is for five years, and considering how important the collection of garbage and other items is to the citizenry, it would behoove all parties to get this as right as possible.
As it stands, some council members have not had time to read the 30-something page document, much less talk it over with other council members.
Our reporter, Dale Ellis, talked to several council members this past week and they fell somewhere between: the document is OK, let’s roll with it, to wait a minute, here, shouldn’t we include the public in on this?
We appreciate that there is so much interest in this agreement, but we are siding wholeheartedly with the contingent of letting the public have a thought.
Said Council Member Win Trafford: “I believe this is something the general public needs to have plenty of time to have public comment because this is something that will affect them for the next five years. It would be fair to say right now I believe we need to give serious consideration as to whether we would want to push this through or give it time for some public comment.”
Council Member Joni Alexander’s experience was a good indicator of what we might hear during a public comment invitation. She said she didn’t have any issues with her garbage pickup but that when she worked in the mayor’s office, complaints about the service were “a headache every day.”
She said she did know from personal experience the horrible smell that permeated her neighborhood for hours after the garbage trucks ran. Is that normal?
Is it also normal for the trucks to leave broken glass and other debris and stinky ooze in front of every container they stop to pick up — to the point that one gentleman told us he finally got his broom and dustpan and went up and down the street cleaning up after the trucks went by? That was after calling week after week to ask the company to pay a bit of attention to the problem, being told someone would be out and then nothing happened.
Is it the best we can do to make residents wade through long wait times and then answer question after question just to schedule a pickup of limbs or bags of leaves? Could Waste Management not create a simpler way of handling that — like email? How about if they send out a text to appropriate customers to remind them of any scheduling changes like Entergy does when there’s a power outage? They want to charge customers more for a second container, but the containers have gotten smaller. Do the customers with smaller containers get charged less? Couldn’t the company just go back to the original containers?
We could go on and on, but we wish we didn’t have to.
There are some assurances that complaints will be better handled by Waste Management going forward. That’s excellent news. But we have questions there as well. The company is said to be operating now with more attention to customer service. If we were to be cynical, we would suggest that the new-found behavior was because a new contract was in the offing.
But let’s say they are acting responsibly and then a new manager comes along and they aren’t. What happens then? Are there thresholds of poor customer service beyond which the company is warned and then fined? Who keeps up with customer complaints? Can a City Council committee review those each month with a company representative? And again, what stick can the city use to compel the company to operate in a way that benefits Pine Bluff residents?
Yes, there is a deadline looming, but we think that is a false urgency. If the city needs an extension to consider this proposed contract in greater detail, surely the current contract can be extended.
The only error the city has made at this point is one of timing. The council should not just now be getting this important contract at the eleventh hour.
But that detail will be forgotten in short order if the city takes more time and settles on a deal that will protect the public from a company that has in many ways shown a lack of interest in providing good customer service. This next five years has to be better than the past five, and the council’s job is to make sure that happens.