Two months after suspending its recycling program, Starkville might get a new one Tuesday that is not expected to be the financial burden to the city that the previous one was.
Aldermen will likely vote Tuesday on a contract with the Waste Pro USA office in Columbus to establish a drop-off site at the sanitation building on North Washington Street. The city had considered partnering with Mississippi State University in its contract with Waste Pro, but those discussions “hit a wall” in November, Ward 5 Alderman Hamp Beatty said.
MSU associate professor of architecture Alexis Gregory spoke at the work session on behalf of an ad hoc committee that formed last year with the goal of improving the recycling program at the time. The committee determined that the city needed to educate the public about the benefits of recycling and remove barriers to the program.
“Barriers of access (included) how to sign up for recycling, when we had a $2 fee and were using green bins,” Gregory said. “That is obviously not an issue anymore, but now we have the drop-off at the sanitation department. We (want) a more organized and better-developed drop-off, and we want to make sure that doesn’t create any barriers to recycling.”
Starkville previously had a contract with Waste Management to haul the collected recyclables to Tupelo, and the cost went up from about $40,000 to about $60,000 this year while revenue totaled only about $24,000, said Ward 2 Alderman Sandra Sistrunk, who started the ad hoc committee.
The spike in cost came from an increase in contaminated or non-recyclable materials after the city suspended curbside pickup in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aldermen voted in September to indefinitely suspend the city’s recycling program as of Oct. 1 and did not include it in the Fiscal Year 2021 budget.
Waste Pro has proposed a $350 hauling fee per load, and cardboard will likely make up the majority of the materials the city receives, said Sistrunk, the board’s budget chairperson.
“We’re talking about two and a half to three hauls a month until the program becomes more established,” she said. “… Once we’re past those startup costs, a program that we’re talking about with drop-off, accepting things where (there is) a ready market, my guess is that it’s going to cost about $11,000 or $12,000 for the remainder of this fiscal year. That’s manageable within our current revenue stream.”
Starting the program in early 2021 will give the city enough time to work the program into the Fiscal Year 2022 budget if it is effective, Sistrunk said.
Recycling programs usually do not make a profit, said Mary Love Tagert, an assistant MSU Extension professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and the president of the Mississippi Recycling Coalition.
However, the city could apply for and receive a variety of grant funds, such as a Solid Waste Assistance Grant from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, to cover costs like recycling bins and public relations campaigns, Tagert said.
She also said continuous community education efforts are key to keeping a recycling program alive, both for community participation and for minimizing contamination and non-recyclable products.
“It doesn’t matter how big or how small your program is,” Tagert said. “You must have education to be successful.”
Only about 1,000 people signed up for the previous program, and Ward 1 Alderman Ben Carver said most people he has talked to about recycling do not participate in it.
Gregory told The Dispatch after the work session that while many Starkville citizens were not aware the previous recycling program existed, she has spoken to Ward 1 residents who do want the city to reinstate the program.
City employees would be stationed at the drop-off site to check materials for contamination or food waste during set hours, and the city would install a fence at the site to prevent people from dropping things off after hours, Sistrunk said.
Environmental Services director Calvin Ware and Ward 7 Alderman Henry Vaughn both said recycling should be an entity outside the city’s sanitation and environmental services department.
Beatty said the cost of reinstating a recycling program would be “minuscule” compared to how much the city pays for solid waste disposal.
“I can’t imagine an SEC college town, or a progressive town anywhere of our size and with our potential, without a basic recycling program,” Beatty said.
Bird scooters interested in Starkville
The scooter ride-sharing service Bird wants to establish itself in Starkville, senior account executive Michael Covato told the board of aldermen Friday.
Bird has a presence in several cities throughout the country that are home to major universities, such as Columbus, Ohio; Austin, Texas and Columbia, Missouri. The company is trying to form a partnership with an entity in the city that it cannot reveal yet, Covato said.
A similar company, Lime, brought both scooters and bicycles to the city in fall 2018 after it brought bikes to MSU. Lime withdrew from the Starkville market in February 2019 when MSU did not allow its scooters on campus.
Mayor Lynn Spruill told The Dispatch she “hated to see them go.”
“There are certain elements of safety that need to be considered, but I do think (scooters) are not just fun but also an alternative means of transportation for people who don’t necessarily have the ability to wait on the SMART bus, because it might not be going where they’re going, or they don’t have a car,” Spruill said, referring to the Starkville-MSU Area Rapid Transit bus system.
Covato said scooters are just as safe to use as bicycles and both the city and drivers should treat them as such. It is up to Bird to decide how many scooters to bring to Starkville if the community partnership goes forward, and Covato said it might start with 100, since the density of the fleet partially determines whether scooters become a reliable form of transportation.
“Having too few scooters is just as bad as having too many,” he said. “I believe Starkville could probably support a fleet of 500, maybe 600 scooters realistically based on demographic data and the size and population, but I certainly think it’s way too many to start with.”
Spruill said the city can give Bird a privilege license to operate and can enact requirements to keep the scooters out of streets and sidewalks when they are not being used.
“If they do that, we won’t have an issue and we won’t have any cause to withdraw their privilege license or fine them,” she said. “I think it will be a learning exercise, but I think they serve a need for both ease of access and entertainment.”
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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