After reviewing the numbers and hearing from public works director Lamar Nix, the Highlands Board of Commissioners decided to hold off on a potential increase to trash pickup rates for residential and commercial customers during Thursday’s board retreat.
Nix informed the board that he had taken immediate action regarding the amount of overtime the sanitation department had paid out over the first half of the 2020-21 fiscal year, which began in July 2020.
“Going forward we will no longer be picking up cardboard on the weekends, we will be limiting weekend hours to four hours per day for our crews, and we will not be using any out-of-department employees to work trash routes,” Nix said. “These are measurable changes that I believe will get our overtime back in order.”
During a finance committee meeting on March 5, town manager Josh Ward proposed increasing trash collection fees by $2.25 per month to cover a surge in overtime that the sanitation department had paid out. Finance director Rebecca Shuler noted that sanitation workers tallied 1,609 hours of overtime in the previous fiscal year and are on pace to work 1,974 hours overtime in the current fiscal year.
There is $45,000 in the current budget to cover sanitation overtime, but Shuler pointed out that approximately $43,000 of that has been spent in eight months. Commissioner Amy Patterson asked Nix why so much overtime was necessary in the sanitation department.
“In terms of where the overtime comes from, we work every weekend and every holiday,” Nix said. “Doing two residential pickups each week and seven day commercial pickup is a lot of hours. The weekends, especially during the tourism season, can be very busy.”
The board agreed to delay an across the board fee increase until information is available regarding the changes Nix put in place. Mayor Patrick Taylor asked Nix to come up with a list of “weekend users” so the board could get a better handle on what commercial businesses are requiring weekend pickup and potentially look at creating a weekend user fee if necessary.
“I think what we are going to find is a small handful of our commercial customers are high-end users on weekends,” Taylor said. “If picking up the trash at those businesses is creating overtime issues maybe we need to look at a fee of some kind for weekend service.”
Nix noted that the nature of Highlands as a tourism-based town also contributes to high trash volumes on the weekends, especially in the public trashcans.
“In the summer we empty the street cans twice a day and sometimes it’s still not enough,” Nix said. “The last thing we want is people leaving trash on the sidewalk, outside the can. So when our guys drive by they stop and grab the cans that are full.”
Taylor asked Nix if having a convenience center closer to Main Street in Highlands would alleviate some of the trash issues associated with the tourism season. Nix said it likely would help, but convenience centers are under the discretion of Macon County, not the Town of Highlands.
“One issue we always run into when we talk about building a convenience center in town is that no one wants a convenience center next door to their property,” commissioner Donnie Callaway said. “We have looked at a couple locations over the years, just in the very preliminary stages, and we have received a lot of pushback.”
Taylor told the board that he would set up a meeting with Jim Tate, Highlands’ representative on the Macon County Board of Commissioners, to discuss a potential convenience center in town limits.