STARKVILLE — Hamp Beatty said he wants to do the right thing for the right reason. More than that, he wants his grandson 15 years from now to know his Pop fought hard to bring back curbside recycling in the city.

That much the Ward 5 alderman likely accomplished during Tuesday’s board meeting at City Hall. But his fellow aldermen gave Beatty’s proposal low marks for sustainability and true cost estimates. They took no action.

Beatty spent roughly a half-hour laying out what he called a “bare-bones” plan to resume curbside recycling in Starkville for the first time since the city shut it down during the COVID-19 pandemic. In spring 2021, the city established a drop-off site at the sanitation department for some recyclables.

Beatty’s proposed opt-in program would add $6 to each participant’s monthly sanitation bill for twice monthly curbside pickup and would include service for cardboard, paper, steel, aluminum and even some plastics.

“I want to do everything possible, that’s socially responsible, to provide the opportunity for the people of Starkville to have curbside recycling,” Beatty pleaded to his board colleagues.

As part of the program, the city would provide participants two 18-gallon recycling buckets for plastics and paper — the city already obtained 500 such containers through a grant and has them on hand, Beatty said — and recyclers could request a 64-gallon roll container for cardboard.

Rather than buying a $300,000-plus tipper truck for recycling, Beatty proposed a sanitation worker pulling the city’s multi-bin Alley Cat trailer behind a pickup, at least for starters.

“This program is not designed … to handle 1,000 customers,” he said. “If we get to 800 or 1,000 customers, we’re going to have to have equipment beyond this. This gets us back in the curbside recycling business.”

The Alley Cat is now mostly stationary at the city’s recycling drop-off site, sanitation director Christopher Smiley told The Dispatch after the meeting. During meeting discussions, Mayor Lynn Spruill asked if the Alley Cat, which is 10 years-old, could handle regularly patrolling city streets.

“It can patrol the streets, but it’s not designed for that,” Smiley responded. “… You would have to factor in wear and tear because we would be using it more than we’re using it now. This will only get you started. This is not a sustainable option.”

Ward 3 Alderman Jeffrey Rupp said he would participate if the city brought back curbside recycling. But to vote for it, he would need hard cost numbers and some assurances the customer fee would at least cover half of those.

Beatty said his plan would be to set up a four-bin site (one each for steel/aluminum, cardboard, paper and plastic) where curbside collections would be taken. Waste Pro, he said, would empty those bins and carry the contents to Columbus for $300 “per pull” — meaning if each bin was pulled once a month, the hauling fee would be $1,200.

“If we had 250 customers, we’d cover the cost of that,” Beatty said, but admitted he was guessing at those costs. “… We’re estimating. We don’t know. If you’re asking for hard numbers, we won’t know until we get in the recycling business and we know how many customers we pick up.”

Beatty’s 250 customer estimate was flanked by a survey and other data presented by Mississippi State Students for a Sustainable Campus, which indicated several hundred city residents showed interest in signing up for curbside recycling. More than a dozen of the organization’s members, including president Emma Van Epps, attended Tuesday’s meeting, and several spoke in favor of curbside recycling during citizen comments.

Still, aldermen remained skeptical of Beatty’s figures, with Ward 2 Alderwoman and budget chair Sandra Sistrunk estimating an opt-in program would require a $15 to $20 monthly customer fee to sustain. Alternatively, the city could run a mandatory program where all households pay a smaller fee, but she doesn’t believe there is an appetite for that.

The city, with support from a grant, operated a comprehensive curbside recycling program starting in 2009, converting to an opt-in program when the grant ran out. In Fiscal Year 2020, the final year of the opt-in program, hauling fees exceeded revenue by $17,000, Sistrunk said, and that did not include other costs like fuel and labor.

She suggested the city request proposals from private companies for curbside recycling service.

“The absolute worst thing we can do is start this, do it for a couple of months and take it away again,” Sistrunk said. “We want to do this right and we want to price it right.”

Once a week garbage pickup?
Beatty, becoming more agitated at what he saw as his colleagues naysaying the program, had different ideas.

For one, the old program had recycling hauled to Tupelo, and he believes hauling fees will be cheaper to Columbus.

Further, he suggested getting rid of the “sacrosanct” twice weekly residential garbage pickup. He detailed recycling programs for seven other Southeastern Conference cities — all of which he acknowledged had recycling processing centers, which Starkville doesn’t — and six of them only pick up residential garbage once weekly.

“That’s the norm, not the exception,” Beatty said. “We could go one day a week garbage pickup and take the other day and dedicate it to curbside recycling. Money would be no object.

“What we’re trying to do is start a bare-bones program because people want curbside recycling,” he added. “… I have a sense we’re trying to find every way in the world not to do this.”

He continued to criticize Spruill and others on the board for trying to keep the program from happening and at one point asked the public to put pressure on his colleagues to “roll up their sleeves” on recycling.

While most board members showed some deference to Beatty, but held firm on needing better numbers, Vice Mayor Roy A. Perkins, who represents Ward 6, outright gave recycling the cold shoulder.

“We don’t have the funds,” he said. “This is not a priority in my opinion.”

Twice-a-week garbage residential garbage pickup, on the other hand, seems to be.

“We don’t want to be run out of our jobs,” Rupp told The Dispatch after the meeting. “We did a survey last year. People like twice-a-week garbage pickup.”

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

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