New Berlin Recycling And Trash Delays: No Fee Cuts Yet

NEW BERLIN, WI — The City of New Berlin announced Monday no plans to reduce recycling or garbage fees for residents, even after some people reported continuing missed or late pickups.

Adjusting garbage and recycling collection fees would require action from the Common Council, the city said. Currently, residents pay $144 per year — or $2.77 per week — for garbage and recycling pickup, the city said in a statement.

Some streets still miss pickups. One resident reported on Facebook that they waited two weeks before their trash was picked up.

The city's contractor, Waste Management, faces a labor shortage and equipment malfunctions but has a hiring campaign and will rent additional trash trucks, the city said in a statement. The labor shortage doesn't qualify as an "uncontrollable circumstance," according to the contract between the company and the city, the city said.

Residents have complained about missed and delayed pickups for the last two months. The city found Waste Management in violation of its contract in early July, according to a previous city statement.

The city believed Waste Management was in breach of its contract with the city because of prolonged delays and poor customer call service experience, the city said.

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New Berlin Mayor Dave Ament said the company didn't do a good job keeping up but was doing a good job working with the city.

"I think they've done a good job of getting a handle on it, working with us and getting it done," Ament said. "I know it's a frustration. My trash got missed a few times."

The city could levy fines on Waste Management by documenting a list of contract violations, Ament said. "We could develop a list of what violations they were and use that to cancel the contract, but you still have a lot of coordination issues."

If the city switched to a different waste management company, it would have to negotiate a new contract, Ament said.

"The problem is the alternatives are very complicated and time-consuming," Ament said. "If it took [the city] two weeks or a month to get them straightened out in the meantime, if that keeps them from making any progress on the pickups, it's counterproductive."

The city contracted Advanced Disposal in 2015 for its residential trash pickups, the city said. Advanced Disposal was purchased by Waste Management in November 2020, it added.

"The biggest thing was the pickup days," Ament said, describing the contract between Waste Management and the city. The company is supposed to pick up garbage from every home once a week, some on different days, Ament said.

"If they don't pick them up every week, the leverage is you go back, and you can penalize them for not picking up the houses they missed," Ament said. "We may not know who [Waste Management] missed unless everybody called."