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Carroll County Solid Waste District customers who live inside city limits will soon see a 4 percent increase on their bills.
The solid waste district said in a Facebook post on Friday, Jan. 3, that there will be an increase for all customers, but Berryville Mayor Tim McKinney, chairman of the waste district’s board of directors, said Monday, Jan. 6, that the increase will not apply to rural customers.
“It’s just folks in the cities,” McKinney said.
The solid waste district has franchise agreements with the cities of Berryville, Eureka Springs, Green Forest and Holiday Island. McKinney said those agreements include a stipulation that allows the district to increase prices to adjust for inflation.
“The index that we use is tied to the waste industry directly,” McKinney said. “It’s a little bit higher than the (Consumer Price Index) because there so much fuel cost involved with it.”
Rural residents filled the solid waste district’s meeting room for a Dec. 10 board meeting after word spread that the district was considering making trash service mandatory for rural customers. After hearing their concerns, McKinney said the waste district board would not consider instituting mandatory service.
He said Monday that the district can raise rural rates at any time.
“Our rural rates, we set them simply by our cost of doing business,” he said. “We can raise them, basically at will.”
McKinney said the waste district is studying the actual cost of serving its city customers compared to the cost of serving rural customers.
“We’ve been losing money for three years and it’s my opinion, and I think some of the other board members’, it’s because we’re losing so much money on the rural. You just do the math — in Berryville, we’ll pick up over a thousand customers a day; in the rural areas, we’ve got routes where we might not picked up a hundred people in a day. Anybody that can do the math knows that that’s not fair to the cities. They’re basically subsidizing the cost of the rural customers. So we’re trying to get a more realistic picture on that.”
McKinney said rate increases are likely for rural customers.
“No business, if they realize they’re losing money, is going to keep losing money over it,” he said. “The rate increases we see in the rural areas, after we do this study, they’ll probably be more than 4 percent.”
McKinney said low-income customers might qualify for assistance with their bills.
“We realize, it’s tough for people out there,” he said. “In our Berryville ordinance, we put a clause in there for a low-income, low-volume rate.”
McKinney said customers who qualify for a sales-tax exemption on their utility bills should qualify for the lower rate on their garbage bills.
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