Over the past few months, complaints have risen from the citizens of Crenshaw County in regards to trash pick up. Many in all areas of the county have gone weeks on end without their trash being disposed of, according to the Crenshaw County Commission, and the time has come to address this issue.

The county’s current waste disposal system contract is with Advanced Disposal out of Tallassee.

According to Charlie Sankey, chairman for the Crenshaw County Commission, complaints regarding missed pick up have been brought to the commission off and on for the entirety of their contract with Advanced Disposal. Once it was apparent that some houses were being missed, the commission gathered every complaint that was filed and looked into the who, where and why.

“We basically had a county wide area problem with Advanced prior to them renewing their contract this last time,” Sankey said.

“A couple of things happen with Advanced. The first thing that happened was they changed their trucks from being maintenanced in Crenshaw County and moved them to Pike County. So, their presence was not a strong in Crenshaw County, which made it tough to keep workers here that knew Crenshaw County really well. They also took guys off the back of the truck and put in these automated pick-up arm trucks, and that caused problems, too.”

Sankey also mentioned that along with changing maintenance areas, the trucks also added mapping systems to the trucks to help aid in finding houses.

“Some of those guys had knowledge of what roads needed to be picked up, but they went to a straight mapping system that, I assume, was generated through some kind of Map Quest or something. But it didn’t have all of the roads on it. So, for a while there was missed pick up everywhere.”

Sankey said that the weather allegedly played a part in the missed pick up. Due to the massive amount of rainfall the county has experienced since December, the roadways have experienced much damage that is still in the process of repair.

“It was a collaboration of a lot of things that caused us to have a lot of constituent complaints. Advanced tried to address that by putting in area supervisors, and when we redid our contract they did not increase their price,” Sankey said.

Sankey stated that after the renegotiating of the contract, the service did seem to get better for a short time, but soon enough there were complaints once again about roads being missed.

Sankey and the commission are currently working to get reimbursement for the many missed pick ups that occurred. While individuals will not be personally reimbursed for the misses, the county hopes to still pursue restitution.

“They (citizens) won’t be compensated, and that’s one of the problems that we’re going to try to address in the new contract. In our last contract, the only way we could get any compensation from Advanced would be to let it go back to the county,” Sankey said.

“Well, that doesn’t do the citizen any good when they’re the one being billed.”

The time for contract renewal has come around once again, and Sankey and the other commissioners have agreed that it is time to seek another waste disposal company.

“We’re doing two things. We’re going after them to reimburse us for all those missed pick ups, and also we’re re-bidding,” Sankey said.

“In the contract, we had the option for automatic renewal, but we’re going to look for our constituents a better garbage service. This will cause our prices to increase, but we’re looking for better quality. We’ve had enough complaints to where the commission has come to the point that our folks would rather pay a little bit more for a better quality service.”

Sankey says that one reason the prices will increase is because the new service will have to bring in all new cans for the entire county. Sankey and the commission know that the price increase does not initially sound pleasant to those in the community, but it is their hope that this new system will help control cost but also get a quality service for the county.

“We’ll send out bids to companies that are interested; we’ve already got four or five companies that have contacted us,” said Sankey.

The commission has already notified Advanced Disposal about the re-bidding process, and will start taking bids closer to July or August of this year. The commission will send out a Request For Quote (RFQ) and will list the specifications for Crenshaw County in that quote, and all interested companies will follow the same guidelines when submitting their bid.