Get over trash ideas
Editor, The Commercial:
A recent editorial on the operation of Waste Management in Pine Bluff made an empty threat: contracting with some other company to collect garbage in the city. There IS no other company, and there hasn't been one this century. In fact, there may not be any other such firm in all of Southeast Arkansas, perhaps the whole state.
To understand why would fill a very tedious volume of little interest to most people.
More currently (though still in the last century), the problem dates to when the city contracted with an outside source to take over what had been a municipal service, thus allowing somebody else to handle all the hassle. Several local companies stepped forward to bid on the service, using workers toting large cans to go yard to yard to empty smaller household garbage cans, which were usually located in the back yard.
These operations contracted with the city, and the contracts usually ran for just one year, allowing for greater competition. (One losing firm actually offered a lower bid, but would have required all households to buy special cans from it. At the time, customers supplied their own cans, usually the aluminum version still sold in a handful of stores.)
In time, an out-of-state company that had started in New Jersey slowly expanded its reign over an ever-increasing territory. Waste Management gradually supplanted all the smaller service providers.
Today, all it takes is a drive through South Arkansas to spot the omnipresent WM logo on garbage receptacles along every highway, byway and county road, as well as the larger receptacles beside or behind every business, large and small.
In Pine Bluff, and probably many another towns, the company has managed to tie its fee collections into those of the water and sewer services, so the consumer cannot separate out that bill and refuse to pay it for unprovided services. (I tried that in 2000, when the double-back ice storms kept garbage men off the streets for a month or so.)
So it seems almost laughable to suggest that a city, any city, contract with anybody else for garbage collection. Any startup that tried would have to try to buy out the local WM operation [unlikely], or pay for its own landfill, garbage trucks, workers, and probably Dumpsters [a copyrighted trademark] and garbage cans.
D. H. Ridgway,
Pine Bluff