Starkville is getting back into the recycling business.
The board of aldermen on Tuesday voted unanimously to authorize City Attorney Chris Latimer to negotiate a contract with Waste Pro USA in Columbus to begin hauling dropped-off waste from a central location beginning next year.
Part of the motion, offered by Ward 2 Alderman Sandra Sistrunk, capped startup costs at $15,000, which would include staging and fencing the drop-off location for recyclables at the Sanitation Department office on North Washington Street as well as launching a marketing campaign to encourage participation.
“This gives us a chance to see just how much support there is and see if there is an opportunity to expand it (in the future),” Sistrunk said.
Starkville, which once had curbside recycling, had dialed back its recycling program in recent years due to high costs and low participation, eliminating it altogether earlier this year as a cost-saving measure amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, officials said Waste Management, the city’s previous contracted service, was charging up to $60,000 annually to haul recyclable materials to Tupelo. Meanwhile the service, for which residents paid a $2 per month fee to participate, generated only about $24,000 in revenue.
Under the new plan, residents can drop off cardboard, paper and aluminum and steel cans for recycling at the central location on weekdays during the Sanitation Department’s regular working hours. Aldermen indicated the program might include Saturday drop-of hours as well, at least once a month.
Residents will not be charged a fee to participate.
Beyond the startup costs, Waste Pro will haul off dropped off materials “as-needed” at a rate of $350 per load, which Ward 5 Alderman Hamp Beatty estimated would cost between $11,000 and $12,000 for the remainder of this fiscal year.
Beatty estimated the city could establish the drop-off and start accepting recycling by February 2021, which would give it eight months to operate before the end of this fiscal year.
“If I were budgeting it for next (fiscal) year, I’d say it would cost $20,000 for a whole year,” Beatty told The Dispatch. “But that’s still a third of what we were paying.”
Beatty had championed partnering with Mississippi State on a joint contract with Waste Pro for recycling, something he told The Dispatch university administration “flat turned down.”
The casualty of going it alone, he said, was plastics, which will not be accepted in the new city program.
“That’s a big deal,” Beatty said. “I’m disappointed we couldn’t get plastics done. If we had included it, though, it would have cost us double.”
Though there’s no revenue stream to offset the recycling costs, Beatty said, high participation could save the city enough in solid waste disposal costs to make it “a wash.”
To get that participation, he proposed a robust awareness program that would even promote recycling in local schools.
“We need to re-educate people here about the need for recycling,” he said.
Several of the aldermen who supported the project echoed Beatty’s and Sistrunk’s concerns about participation.
Ward 1 Alderman Ben Carver pointed to other cities in Mississippi, specifically Clinton, which had booming recycling programs. He said he didn’t understand why it never caught on in Starkville.
“I don’t think recycling can sustain itself long-term with minimal participation,” Carver said. “… I don’t know what the magic formula is to get people involved.”
Beatty, speaking with The Dispatch, said he had spoken with officials in other cities that fund their recycling programs with a mandatory monthly fee for all sanitation customers, regardless of whether they recycle. Those cities get high participation, he said, because “they want to get their money’s worth.”
“We don’t have the political will on our board to put that kind of mandatory fee on residents,” Beatty said. “But I would support one.”
Mayor Lynn Spruill also echoed those concerns and said restarting the program would allow city leaders to gauge the program’s effectiveness before setting the Fiscal Year 2022 budget.
“This is something we do with the goal of reducing our carbon footprint and paying a little bit of money to do that,” Spruill told The Dispatch after the meeting.
In other business, aldermen unanimously changed the city’s co-smoking ordinance to allow a cigar lounge to open at the old Mugshots Grill location on Main Street.
The amended ordinance adds cigar lounges as exceptions to the public smoking ban. Other exceptions are private clubs, designated rooms in hotels or motels and stores that sell tobacco or electronic cigarettes and are “not adjoined or physically connected to another business or residence.”
Spring Street Cigars owner John Higgins of Tupelo met with aldermen earlier this month to discuss locating a cigar lounge at the old Mugshots and requested the ordinance change.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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