Clarke County residents could see a significant cut to their monthly garbage bill after commissioners opened competing bids for the county’s solid waste contract, with the lowest offer coming in well below what residents currently pay.
Waste Management submitted the low bid at Tuesday’s Clarke County Commission meeting in Grove Hill, offering $22.82 a month for weekly residential pickup — down from the current residential rate of $34.10 a month, a cut of roughly a third. An additional $8.68-a-month add-on would cover bulky-item pickup. The company’s commercial rates started at $130.84 a month for a two-cubic-yard dumpster collected weekly.
Two other companies also submitted bids. Waste Pro offered $37.60 a month for weekly residential collection, with bulky waste pickup priced separately at 90 cents a month, plus $218.31 a month for a two-cubic-yard commercial dumpster. Republic Services, the county’s current provider, bid $32.84 a month for residential collection with no separate bulky-item charge, and $160.74 a month for commercial dumpster service.
Commissioners did not award the contract on the spot, agreeing instead to finalize the decision after a final review of the bids. If Waste Management’s bid is ultimately accepted, as appears likely given the price gap, the new contract would take effect Nov. 1.
The commission also handled a batch of other business at the same meeting: voting to apply for a $500,000 Community Development Block Grant to resurface 3.5 miles of Asbury Road, with the county providing a $50,000 match; approving a $739 half-page color ad in the county newspapers’ football preview edition; appointing Jake Bailey to the county merit board to fill a vacancy left by the death of longtime member Earl King; and signing off on a final payment of just over $100,000 to ABM Building Solutions for a multimillion-dollar energy-savings renovation to the courthouse and jail, a payment that had been withheld pending satisfactory completion of the work.
County engineer Lance Jordan also told commissioners the county can no longer buy dirt from the Finch pit, a longtime source of fill dirt for county road projects, and said his office is searching for an alternate source. Separately, Commissioner Barry Chancey raised ongoing landline outages from provider Bright Speed affecting the Coffeeville area — outages that have run as long as 10 days at a stretch — and said he intends to press the company directly on the issue.