After months of review, county bids out rural trash, recycling services
By Audrey Posten | Times-Register
Clayton County is accepting bids for rural trash and recycling services, and anticipates to have a contract in place by June 1. A scope of services released last week includes both weekly pickup at remote sites in the county as well as collection at the county shop in Elkader.
The bidding process comes several months after the Clayton County Board of Supervisors (BOS), facing strong objections from residents, re-evaluated a plan that would have eliminated rural garbage collection sites and required those in rural dwellings to dispose of their garbage in Elkader.
Current BOS chair Doug Reimer called the backlash a wakeup call.
“We’re not getting rid of the rural sites. We heard you guys loud and well,” he told residents gathered at the April 1 BOS meeting.
The scope of services includes an item for weekly trash and commingle recycling collection at six rural sites in the county—in Gunder, Garnavillo, Strawberry Point, Garber, Millville and McGregor. The contractor is asked to staff the sites a minimum of five hours each, or four hours for Saturday locations.
The contractor will propose the weekly schedule, with approval by the board of supervisors. The contractor will also propose pricing for each of these locations and the county will select, at its discretion, which locations it will operate.
Additionally, the contractor will be asked to use an electronic system to track which residents use this service and at which locations, and to verify that only rural residents are using this service.
Reimer said a similar system works well in other counties.
“[Residents] fill out a form, and when they come in, they have a sticker or something on their car to monitor that the right people are using the sites. It depends on who gets the contract on how that’s going to be done,” he explained.
According to Reimer, the county will use this system to determine the feasibility of each site and may choose to alter sites after the first year of the contract.
“If we only have a few coming, we have to do something different,” he said.
When asked the determining factor on what constitutes “enough customers,” the board was unsure at this time.
“We’ll have a count,” said supervisor Ray Peterson. “If we have three people at one place and 300 at another, we need to do something different.”
“Is 50 enough or 100? We haven’t done that. We’re going to look into it after the first year,” Reimer added. “It doesn’t mean we’re cutting anything, but it’s possible. We’re trying to keep it feasible to keep our costs in line for the county while also making it feasible for the company who’s doing it.”
The BOS cited costs as the impetus for bidding the services. The county budgets $175,000 annually for garbage services, an amount Peterson said current hauler Hawkeye Sanitation planned to raise by nearly $200,000. Hawkeye stated the jump was because it had not raised prices for the county in 15 years.
Separate to collection at remote sites, a contractor can bid on providing daily (Monday through Saturday) disposal of trash/recycling for Clayton County rural residents at the county shop in Elkader. That would include having a trash compactor, cardboard compactor and commingle recycling roll-off, which would all be dumped as needed.
The contractor will propose all-inclusive monthly pricing that is inclusive of pull fees, landfill tonnage, recycling tipping fees, fuel surcharges and any other fees. The price should be consistent month to month.
According to the scope of services, this fee should include up to 3,000 tons of disposal per year, and the contractor should propose a price to bill the county per additional ton over 3,000 tons.
A third item on the RFP asks contractors to propose pricing to dispose of construction debris and bulk items by a roll-off container at the Elkader County Shop site. Clayton County charges residents a fee to dispose of special items at the roll-off container located in Elkader, and these fees are retained by the county. Contractors should propose a price structure that includes a per-haul rate and a landfill tonnage fee to haul this roll-off.
Clayton County requests a three-year contract for the rural sites and five years for the Elkader site.
Reimer said proposals will be given to four companies: Hawkeye Sanitation, Town and Country Sanitation, Waste Management and Kluesner Sanitation. Bidding information will be placed on the county website so additional companies can bid if they choose.
Although the BOS said it would prefer to have one contractor for all aspects of collection, each company can bid on all or part of the proposal. Waste Management already indicated it will not bid on the rural sites, according to Reimer.
Residents, as well as representatives of Hawkeye Sanitation, feared varying lengths of contracts and uncertainty surrounding the remote sites could hinder the bidding process.
“I just see there’s no guarantee for the hauler that they’ll have business after a year. As the hauler, I don’t know how to bill on that,” said Julian Merritt from Hawkeye Sanitation. “The longer a contract is, the closer you can cut it down because we know we’re going to have business year after year. If we don’t have those insurances...This is extremely risky on the part of the hauler.”
Residents also questioned a line on the RFP that says “Clayton County reserves the right to refuse any and all bids, and accept any bid that it determines will best serve the county.”
If a company meets the parameters and has the lowest bid, why would the BOS not select them?
“More than likely it will be the lowest, but there might be something we have back in some notes and say, ‘Oh, we can’t do this,’” Reimer said. “We have taken cheaper prices on some things and it hasn’t worked.”
Bids will be received at the Clayton County Board of Supervisors Office in Elkader until 9 a.m. on Tuesday, April 22. Bids will be opened at 10 a.m. that day, during open session of the supervisors’ weekly meeting.
Reimer assured audience members that he, Peterson and the other supervisor, Steve Doeppke, put a lot of work into determining the scope of services.
“We’re trying to start all over from ground zero and put something together to give us better management of what’s going on. That’s why we proposed this as we did,” he said.
