Seymour officials hope to make recycling easier and more frequent for residents.
To get there, they plan to bypass the bidding process required for large town contracts.
The town has a contract to use Winter Bros. Hauling of CT for both trash and recycling through 2016. Seymour currently pays $317,016 for trash pickup and about $144,000 for recycling each year, according to First Selectman Kurt Miller.
Winter Bros. has offered to double its recycling pickup from every other week to every week if the town extends the contract five additional years, Miller said. Recycling would switch to “single stream,” which means residents won’t have to separate their recyclables.
Under the proposal, the town would see a 1.8 percent average annual increase in costs for trash pickup and a 1.58 percent average annual increase for recycling costs, Miller said.
“I think this is a good deal across the board for the town of Seymour,” Miller told the Board of Selectmen at its meeting Tuesday, Sept. 2.
The Catch
Seymour Selectmen can’t just vote to extend the contract.
Seymour’s charter requires contracts of more than $25,000 be put out to a competitive bidding process.
“If we put this out to competitive bid, we might not get the same offer,” Miller told the Board of Selectmen.
But there’s a loophole in the town’s charter that would allow the Board of Selectmen to vote — after giving the town’s people a chance to have their say.
A “town meeting” can vote to waive the bidding process, according to town counsel Richard Buturla.
The town meeting requires 50 people in order to have a quorum. If 50 people don’t show up to the town meeting, the Board of Selectmen can make the decision in the voters’ place, Buturla said.
The last Seymour town meeting had 25 people.
And that was to discuss the budget proposal that residents eventually shot down at the polls.
Burturla and Miller said using the town meeting as a way to waive the bidding makes sense in this case.
“These contracts were competitively bid in the past,” Buturla said.
The two companies that bid? Winter Bros. and Latella Rubbish Removal, which Winter Bros. eventually bought out.
Miller called Winters Bros. a “very reputable company,” and said they were very easy to work with.
The Board of Selectmen scheduled the town meeting to discuss the contracts for Sept. 16 at Seymour Town Hall.
Recycling Changes Proposed
If the new contract is approved on Sept. 16, Seymour residents would have recycling pick-up every week, instead of every other week.
Winter Bros. plans to purchase a new truck and new 96-gallon containers for trash and recycling for each resident, under the contract.
While the cost per unit for recycling pick-up would increase over the 5‑year contract, so would the rate Winter Bros. pays for recyclable materials. In the existing contract, Winter Bros. pays $10 per ton of recyclables.
In the new contract, that rate would go up to $12 per ton.
That means if more people recycle more, the town could break even on the increased service costs, Miller said. That’s because the town also pays $77.25 for each ton of garbage it must dispose of, and Miller assumes the recycling tonnage would mean less weight is being added to the trash each week.
“Every ton we don’t send through the process (of trash collection) saves us $77.25,” Miller said. “Every ton added to recycling saves us $12.”
If approved, the new recycling schedule would not go into effect until November, Miller said.
