Citizens living in the Greenville city limits will be paying a little bit extra for their trash pick-up services at the beginning of October.

Monday night, the Greenville City Council voted to pass an ordinance that will raise monthly trash services from $14 to $19 effective Oct. 1. Greenville Mayor Dexter McLendon said the reason behind the rate increase was “strictly a business decision.”

“We had an outside accounting firm come in and do some research for us to find out where we could be saving money as a city,” he said. “What we found was is that it’s costing us $4.49 more per household now to provide trash services than it did in the past. So, adding $5 to the current trash fee wasn’t a number we just pulled out of the air. When it comes down to it, the decision was strictly a business decision for the city.”

The ordinance passed – 2018-03 – amends the ordinance that had been in place since 2003. The $19 per month charge is for 90/95-gallon roll-out garbage containers plus and additional $8 per month for a second roll-out garbage container.

“Another cost we’ve had to deal with recently is the addition of our new limb trucks,” McLendon concluded. “Those trucks will last us a while, but they’re a lot to keep maintained. We don’t try and make money off of trash services. We’re just doing everything we can do to keep total costs to the city down.”