County divided over how to take out the trash

County divided over how to take out the trash

BY TERRY SCHMIDA

A festering dispute over how much the county should pay for trash removal is beginning to stink like a garbage bag filled with shrimp tails in the Florida Keys sun.

On one side is the Waste Management company, which claims it is owed $85.80 per ton removed. On the other, is the county, whose staff claim the contract governing the matter clearly spells out an $84.50 price tag for the service.

It might not sound like a lot of money, but given that the company removes some 85,000 tons of county detritus annually, the difference amounts to about $110,000 per year, an amount large enough to split the Board of County Commissioners into two camps, over how to resolve the issue.

For its part, Waste Management claims the discrepancy is part of a clerical mistake stemming from multiple drafts of a 10-year deal being passed back and forth between the two parties as a new contract was being finalized, nearly two years ahead of schedule, back in May of 2014. Waste Management’s point man in the Keys, Greg Sullivan, claims that a 1.5 percent consumer price index payment should have kicked in, as of last October.

“It was an honest error,” Sullivan said. Monday. “We’ve been here a long time, and want to fix this minor error and move on.”

The company’s dealings with the county date back to 1991.

The affair was discussed at the April meeting of the BOCC, and split the commission in two, with Sylvia Murphy, David Rice and George Neugent taking Waste Management’s side, and Heather Carruthers and Danny Kolhage arguing the company’s staff should have noticed the mistake before the contract was signed.

Murphy’s position was that both sides in the deal made a mistake.

Carruthers, however, was more vehement that county taxpayers shouldn’t be held responsible for a private company’s accounting errors.

On Monday Carruthers repeated her contention that the price should not be changed.

“[Waste Management’s] attorneys reviewed it several times,” she said. “The price was printed in red ink. They presented it at multiple meetings. That’s what we voted on, and that’s what we approved.”

Since her side is in the minority, however, the commissioner acknowledged that some give-and-take on the issue was likely to occur.

“I imagine some of my colleagues want to really change the price in the contract,” Carruthers said. “I understand that legally we can’t do that. So we’re going to have to back out to bid, and I’m fine with doing that.”

Carruthers added that additional discussion would likely take place at the BOCC’s next meeting, but that any new bid would take time to prepare, even if the process involved “dusting off” the old one.

“It’s a multi-month process,” she said.