City board to vote on garbage rate hike to cover $1.6M shortfall

VICKSBURG, Miss. (VDN) — A decision to tackle the looming $1.6 million garbage contract deficit will be finalized this Friday at the city board meeting at 10 a.m. in the Robert M. Walker building.

In a special work session held Monday, Mayor Willis Thompson, Ward 1 Alderman T.J. Mayfield, Ward 2 Alderwoman Vickie Bailey, and city accountant Doug Whittington, looked at all four fee increase options available to determine the best plan of action.

The challenge the current administration is facing is due to a less than ideal 2023 contract with Waste Management that charged more for less. Under the new contract, Waste Management no longer picks up trash or debris outside of cans, and to offset the new rule, the city begin offering a second brown can for residential and up to three additional cans for small commercial businesses.

According to Whittington, the city did not raise rates across the board, ultimately leading to the previous administration subsidizing residential rates without directly charging users, a violation of state statute which requires that solid waste services be fully funded by user fees, not the general fund.

“Regardless of how it happened, we have to take care of it,” said Thompson. “We have to take action, we can’t keep running in a deficit. So we have to formulate a plan to not only pay for the cost of disposing and collecting garbage, but now we have a deficit that we have to pay for.”

The four options, based on a payoff of 1-4 years, will increase garbage rates by $22.69 per month if the city chooses the 1 year plan, $14 per month for the 2 year plan, $10.61 per month for the 3 year plan, and $9.10 per month for the 4 year plan. These increase are based on the current rate of $21 per month.

“I think it was going to be a hard sale for the one year because it’s going to bump garbage up to above $40 a month,” said Mayfield. 
”I know that’s hard for us to sell that to people. The four-year doesn’t allow us to lower the trash back down, just spread it evenly across four years without the option of lowering it.”

The two year or three year plans look to be the better of the four options according to Ward 1 Alderman Mayfield, who In the July 7 board meeting, put his support behind the two year plan.

“With the two-year [plan] you pay a little bit more on the front end, but they save about $192 when you lower it back down for those last two years,” said Mayfield.

Savings could stem from CPI adjustments that occur each July 1. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services.

Ward 2 Alderwoman Bailey said that after an informal poll the majority would prefer to “bite the bullet” and go ahead and get the debt paid off in a year.

“We said that we want to go ahead and restore the financial health of a city,” said Bailey. “So I understand when we say two [years] but I say, let the general public buy in, let’s see what they want. Let’s do a census with them and let them see. If they say, let’s go ahead and bite the bullet and go ahead and take it out, you’ll see that change within a year. We’ll be back [at cost] at a quicker time.”

Regardless of the final decision, the order must be done by city ordinance, and once put into the minutes, will take an estimated six weeks before the city will begin to start collections on the new rates.

The move would be a next step in getting the city’s reserves back up.

“One of the things we’ve noticed is that we got there focus on getting our reserves up, being more responsible, making some cuts and drawbacks, but it’s hard to do that with a deficit,” said Thompson.
”So getting the deficit paid, we can start building our cash reserves and reserves back to the fund.”