Dale commission seeks bids for garbage pickup

The Dale County Commission voted to seek bids on the county garbage pickup service during the

July 9 meeting.

The vote came after commissioners were told in April that the current garbage pickup provider, Mark Dunning Industries, had asked to renegotiate the contract that they have held with the county since December 2013.

Dale County Commission Chairman Mark Blankenship told commissioners at the April 24 commission meeting that if there were material changes in the existing contract, law required that the contract be rebid. Dale County Attorney Henry Steagall confirmed that the contract would have to be rebid if changes were to be made to the existing contract.

The bids for the three-year contract, with a three-year rollover under the same terms, will be solicited with two options. One option is with the service contractor providing the rollout cans and one is with the county providing the rollout cans.

M.D.I. began distributing the 6,400 95-gallon rollout garbage carts in Dale County in December 2014 and began weekly household garbage pickup services in February 2014 to those in the Dale County Solid Waste service area to include the city of Level Plains and the town of Clayhatchee. The city of Daleville has a separate garbage pickup service provider.

Blankenship told the commission July 9 that there are two locations in the county where road conditions make it difficult for garbage trucks to travel so M.D.I. had opted to place a dumpster there for road residents to use. M.D.I. incurs the cost of that dumpster, Blankenship said. “So it does not change the contract but my concern is that if a person bids (the garbage pickup contract) that is not in the dumpster business, they might have to outsource it or run that road on a pickup.”

The commissioners will inform all contractors of that situation during the pre-bid meeting in lieu of adding it to the contract, it was decided.

In unrelated business, Blankenship told the commissioners that the cost of housing juvenile offenders with the Southeast Alabama Youth Services will increase from $96 a night to $106 a night. Each county incurs the housing cost of all juvenile offenders arrested in that county, regardless of where the juvenile is from.

Concern about the rising cost of housing juvenile offenders is not new to the Dale County Commission. At a meeting Nov. 14, 2018 Blankenship told the commissioners that the cost to Dale County to house juvenile offenders had exceeded the budgeted amount of $8,333 a month by $40,000 in 2017.

In other business, the council agreed to begin the Aug. 23 work session at 9 a.m. instead of the regularly scheduled 10 a.m. in order to begin discussions about the next fiscal year’s budget.

The next meeting of the Dale County Commission is Tuesday, Aug. 23. A work session begins at 9 a.m. and is followed immediately by a voting meeting. Both meetings are open to the public.