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I want to thank everyone who attended the public engagement session and special city council meeting on sanitation this past Tuesday, Jan. 6. This community turned out in a big way to speak to council, the mayoral administration, Waste Management, Rumpke and others regarding our questions and concerns with proposed ordinances that, if passed, will lead to our municipal trash and recycling services being contracted out to private companies. It was so heartening to see democracy in action.

While the ordinance to contract out trash services to Waste Management passed on first reading, there is still a second reading of the ordinance taking place at the regularly scheduled council meeting this coming Tuesday, Jan. 13. I encourage folks to speak to your councilpersons prior to Tuesday’s meeting and to attend the meeting and engage there as well on this ordinance.

A vote on a separate ordinance that would contract out recycling services to Rumpke, an Ohio company, for an optional monthly fee paid only by those who wish to recycle has been tabled until Feb. 10. As of now, this service would be provided for $15.25 a month, with 6 months due up front to begin the service ($91.50), plus $20 for the purchase of a 95-gallon recycling cart. The cost would rise to $15.86 per month in the second year, $16.49 in the third year, and $17.15 then $17.84 for optional fourth and fifth years.

This means that if someone participates in the city’s recycling program for a full five years with Rumpke collecting, as of now, they will pay $991.08 over that timespan for being responsible enough to recycle rather than sending recyclable materials to a landfill. As of now, if 900 or fewer individuals or households participate in this voluntary recycling program, the city is on the hook for guaranteeing payment. Assuming a participation rate of exactly 900 for five years, the city would be paying Rumpke $4,459,860 for this service.

I’ve heard that there are anywhere from 12,000 to 13,000 households or “units” in Parkersburg. Assuming the lower number, 900 participants represents 0.75% of households. If 13,000 is closer to correct, that’s 0.69% of households. I would bet money that a very low number of households will participate in a program that costs them $183 to $214.08 per year over five years, on top of the $19.50 per month they’ll be paying the city for services provided by Waste Management for their trash (for the first year).

City representatives say that they are working to address the costs of this contract while a vote on the ordinance is tabled until Feb. 10. Seeing as both Council President Andrew Borkowski and City Finance Director Eric Jiles wanted to delay the vote by only seven days, I don’t figure the city is really working all that hard to make recycling options more affordable.

We have an exceptional recycling facility in the city that will close if the city signs the contract with Rumpke for collection. Mayor Tom Joyce and Jiles say that the facility operated at a $3.8 million cumulative loss for fiscal years 2019-2025 and that they can’t keep it staffed. That brings to mind some questions I neglected to ask Tuesday but will pose here: Why did the city allow commercial haulers to haul in recyclables from outside Parkersburg for free throughout the entire existence of this facility if the facility was losing money? Why did the city, possibly with the assistance of the Wood County Solid Waste Authority using grant or even private donation funds, not obtain scales and other equipment necessary to weigh the outside waste being brought in by these commercial haulers and charge for it?

Staffing issues in the sanitation department come down to earnings and overall compensation. Problems with insufficient pay for such dirty and physically demanding, yet essential, work should have been addressed long before now. Instead, the city waited until it could call this a crisis and decided that the best crisis management solution is to contract out sanitation services.

Perhaps the Solid Waste Authority will come up with a solution that offers a countywide recycling drop-off location. I certainly trust SWA Board Member Wayne Dunn to take this matter very seriously and find solutions. But what a shame that, in all likelihood, the great facility at 100 24th St. in Parkersburg will become nothing more than a glorified parking garage and storage unit for the city. Recycling should be a no-brainer; it should be thought of as a core civic duty and should be made readily available with buy-in from the entire community, not as an optional pay-to-play that penalizes people for practicing common sense handling of recyclable waste.

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Eric Engle is a resident of Parkersburg.