Guest Essay: Selma city councilman explains why he opposes the city taking over garbage

I always think about what effect I may have on the community with my writing. I do not wish to cause controversy, but I do want to share the truth. I generally do not write until controversy has reared its head, and I think the public deserves to know the truth behind the issues in order to understand the depth of the situation before having an opinion on it.

I have been a little disturbed by Mayor Perkins’ finger pointing at the Evans Administration over this garbage fiasco we’ve been dealing with for almost 25 years, and he is publicly accusing the council of delaying and blocking his agenda. It’s been said publicly and put into writing that the issues began in 2010 under the leadership of our late, great Mayor George Evans, and I intend to clear his name of this mess in this short essay, while also providing a glimpse into some of the issues that have persisted for much longer and persist to this day.

We’ve got a garbage issue. It is not an uncommon issue. It is an issue we knew we had when we entered office in November of 2020. It is an issue that was at the top of the list of things we need to fix when we campaigned because it was at the top of the list for just about everybody that lives and works in Selma and Dallas County. And it is not going away without trying new policies.

I’m going to expose some truth behind this issue in an effort to try a new way of getting the City of Selma cleaned up. I think “cleaning up” is one of the most important things the city can do for the citizens of Selma because it means eradicating blight, both physically and mentally, changing attitudes, attracting business and living healthy.

Billing Issues

In 2001, the City of Selma took over garbage billing from the Selma Water Works and Sewer Board (SWWSB). As I understand it, SWWSB was asking to get paid for their part in billing, and Perkins did not want to pay. In an article dated Jan. 28, 2003, Mayor Perkins says, “The collection letters stem from the time when the Selma Water Works and Sewer Board collected the garbage bills. This lasted from 1994-2001.” This begs the question, “What are ‘the collection letters?’” Oddly enough, three months earlier in an article dated Nov. 13, 2002, Mayor Perkins stated in his State of the City Address, “The city has made money by converting the Garbage Fee Collection Process from the Water and Sewer Board itself. In doing so Selma has raised revenue from garbage collection over $107,000.”

So maybe he’s right. Maybe the city started making money all of a sudden just one year after the SWWSB stopped collecting for the city. Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe there are hidden costs that were not exposed. Maybe there was debt that was not talked about. Let’s dive deeper into the issue to find out.

In December of 2004 an article was published about the presentation of a budget from Mayor Perkins that stated, “Garbage collection - The proposal also recommends changing trash pickup from backdoor to curbside, generating an additional $141,920 from commercial customers. In addition, the city will generate one-time only revenue of $140,000 by selling seven garbage trucks that will no longer be needed. There will be some initial costs in switching the garbage pickup, including the purchase of arm-reach trucks, dumpsters, overhead trucks and containers. The equipment would cost about $201,000 and would be spread over a five-year period. The equipment would allow the city to reduce manpower by 19 employees. 

“The city should retain its present competitive pricing for commercial pick-up, develop a dumpster size standard and aggressively re-enter this market,” the proposal states.

Wow! This sounds like an amazing deal! The city is going to make more money than ever before, more than the SWWSB ever lost, apparently. This sounds familiar: hypothetically great deals for the city that don’t come to fruition.

A year later, in 2005, a letter to the editor from Greg Bjelke showed that our state of cleanliness at that time had not changed. Greg says in his letter, “All over town there are small landfills on the curb where one can place any sort of garbage for the orange trucks to pick up. A three-bedroom home could be furnished with furniture and other junk that is placed out for pick-up. Recently before the holes were filled in with red clay, some of the holes were 2 or 3 feet deep. The city is to blame for a large part of this problem, by not teaching or informing the public what is allowed and not allowed on the streets.  Wasn’t the curb for yard trash only? They are also to blame by not enforcing the codes that are already in place. Factor in burned and abandoned houses, junked cars and we have ourselves a big mess. I would like to see the city get their act together and get serious about getting this town cleaned up for a prouder town. Fine, if the city wants to make changes in the present service to save money, but let that change also help clean up the town as well. My suggestions: educate the public what is allowed. Enforce the codes. Fine negligent property owners. Improve the current service. “ 

Let me remind you, during 2005 the city was providing full garbage service to the citizens of Selma. At this point, the only differences from the year 2000 is that (1) there is a new administration and new public works director, (2) the city is now billing instead of SWWSB, without threat of cutoff, and (3) it sounds like there’s been a change in how garbage operates in terms of manpower and equipment, which is being address in this same year. 

An article from April 2005 states, “In other news, the city discussed the confusion over its decision to buy garbage trucks. The city passed two resolutions last night, to spend $492,000 on three trucks over a five-year period. Because of the wording of the contract there was some confusion over whether the city was buying or leasing the trucks.”

This sounds eerily familiar to what we’re hearing come from the administration today. To be clear, the administration is now asking the council to lease new trucks. There is also currently confusion over our finances, and there are these great new hypothetical ideas being introduced for new procedures that are being sold as eliminating our issues. Back to 2005, we hear on two occasions from then Public Works Director Henry Hicks about the “progression” of the city’s change to curbside garbage collection.

“Hicks reported that the city would be providing 6,000 carts to all of Selma’s residences. The service is scheduled to start on May 2. We’ll be ready to go,” Hicks said. A month later, we hear again, “Hicks told the city that the program was continuing as planned, although it would probably be Thursday when all the carts are delivered to residences. ‘We are picking up 1,500 a day,’ he said.”

Note that in 2005, the city was saying that we need 6,000 carts. In the 19 years since then, the city has lost over 10% of its population, according to the census (pre-tornado), yet in our public works committee meeting the other day, we were told that we needed 6,300 garbage carts. That math doesn’t add up for me.

Let’s jump forward to the 2008 campaign. When Jean Martin was quoted in an Aug. 14 article, she stated, “Although it is a slow process, the city has collected about $70,000 in outstanding garbage fees. She also called for combining the garbage collection fees with water and sewer.”  

And in 2010, we see what’s happened due to the garbage bill being taken from the water bill. “Under city garbage collections, trash was often picked up whether the balance was paid or not. This resulted in around $1 million in unpaid bills. Perhaps the best solution that has been suggested is for the city to continue to offer trash collections with more incentive for residents to stay on top of their bills. In years past, the city tied garbage collection fees to water bills. If residents ignored their trash bill, they were not only left with a yard full of trash, they were denied water service.” This request is still being made by our citizens, so I believe we should work towards that goal. 

In 2012 with STJ candidate endorsements, the paper stated, “We challenge the mayor to find a solution to the inefficient city garbage system or get out of the business altogether.” And they did. This is when the City of Selma went to private collection, likely due to the astronomical increase in the cost of equipment, partnered with the debt load for unpaid collections.

In a 2012 article, it was stated, “The city’s tax and license director, Roosevelt Goldsby, announced in Tuesday’s council work session that there are thousands of dollars in unpaid bills for the city’s trash pick-up system. Another topic of discussion was how to get those residents who dump their trash on the streets and are allusive about paying their bills to cooperate with the new company. Evans said it was his initial understanding that those individuals who dumped trash would be cited.”

Cited. That requires an APO-certified officer from Code Enforcement. Keep that in mind.

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Looking at the total history of garbage collection, we get to the roots of the issues:

1. Unpaid bills. This is not a new issue. In fact, it is our oldest issue. It is my understanding that unpaid garbage bills are what caused Selma Water Works and Sewer Board to ask the city to begin paying them for billing, to which the response from the administration at the time was, NO. 
   1. Should we look at paying SWWSB for their time and supplies? In my opinion, YES.
   2. The other issues that come with unpaid bills are higher costs on consumers. The fact is, when people don’t pay their bills, it increases costs to the company and therefore increases the cost of doing business, which increases the price to do business. The cost from the few who don’t pay eventually gets put onto the backs of those who do pay.  This is simple economics. There is not much we can do about this, and the citizens are going to suffer these losses no matter who picks up garbage. If the city does it, we pull funds from existing revenues and therefore exhaust our already mismanaged services, or we increase revenues by increasing taxes. If a private entity does it, your garbage bill gets increased. I don’t care what the mayor is telling us; one of these two options is inevitable.
   3. In terms of how to mitigate this system of financial abuse, we must have good legal counsel and a good judicial system. Improvements are being made in both areas.
   4. Enforcement of litter laws. This is an ongoing issue, which actually has a solution: code enforcement. 
      1. Code enforcement requires detailed laws that provide for due process, good management, certified officers and a fair judicial system in order to be effective. The City of Selma is currently lacking certified supervision, certified code enforcement officers and to go further, a number of police officers who could also write citations.  While I’m in favor of this, we don’t seem to have good administration here that allows for this department to do all it needs to do, and our police officers have their hands full.
      2. The state has recently given counties authority that municipalities don’t have: litter control. Dallas County has a litter control officer who seeks out litter, garbage and dumping offenses and works directly with ADEM to clean up waste sites. We are currently trying to contract with the county to get four new litter officers on the streets of Selma to enforce these litter laws and hold people accountable. This could bring hundreds of thousands of dollars of benefits to the city in cleaning up our dump sites, along with a level of enforcement we’ve never had. Let’s try it!

This brings me to another point. Mayor Perkins, who essentially started this issue by being stubborn with SWWSB, now wants to bring garbage pickup back up under the City of Selma’s purview of services.  I take issue with this for several reasons.

1. As is evident in the history of what we’re dealing with, Mayor Perkins has failed to fix the issue for almost 11 years of his three terms, and some would argue that he started the issue. I began the process working alongside him in 2020 and was fooled into voting for something that does not work. We have already followed the mayor’s leadership, which got us into the complicated mess we’re in. It failed, so I cannot put my trust in him for these reasons.
2. The services that the City of Selma Public Works Department currently provides are lacking. We do not have good management in this area, and therefore we are inefficient. In this particular scenario, I feel like the private sector will be more efficient. Our Public Works Department is not on schedule for trash pickup and leaves yard debris for weeks at a time. We cannot afford to do that with garbage.
3. We (the city council) are in our last year of service and should not be trying to implement new strategies before somebody else takes office. This is ill-advised on many levels. My opinion is that we let the next administration take leadership initiative in this based on the small fixes we can make today.
4. Mayor Perkins has stated publicly that the city was making $500k annually when the city had garbage. I’ve shown that this is not true, and that we actually had over $1M in uncollected fees.  Not only that, our financial outlook on this has also been misconstrued. It looks to be a financially unstable proposition.
5. Currently the city is putting the cost of Social Security-exempt customers onto the citizens who pay by making the garbage contractor service these garbage carts at no cost, which increases the cost to the customers who pay. The law states that the municipality must pay these costs to the contractor. Ultimately, the citizen pays either way, but this is something we have to fix.
6. Mayor Perkins states that the city will go bankrupt if we don’t increase property taxes, which is part of this garbage takeover initiative. I disagree. I think we can be more efficient in so many ways where we are failing to provide adequate services. But if we try to take on this garbage program and it is not managed properly, we could really go bankrupt.

I do not want to cause controversy. I just want Selma to know the truth about the history of this controversy, and I want you to understand why I have been outspoken against the city taking over garbage. City garbage service is something that is attainable, but we need three major factors to swing in our direction – good management, good billing with a cutoff notice, and most importantly, code enforcement. I think with a new administration focused on these things first and foremost and having proved to do this well, we can, in fact, look more closely at a city garbage service.

Clay Carmichael is president pro tem of the Selma City Council and chairman of the Public Works Committee.

References

(Provided by Carmichael)

2001 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2003/01/28/garbage-collections-rile-residents/

2002 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2002/11/13/state-of-the-city/

2004 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2004/12/19/budget-presented/

2005 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2005/03/17/letters-to-the-editor-for-thursday-march-17/

April 2005 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2005/04/12/mayor-information-requests-getting-burdensome/

2005 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2005/04/26/mayor-threatens-boycott-of-cable-company/

2005 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2005/05/10/school-board-members-selected/

In the 2008 campaign, Read more at:  https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2008/08/14/candidates-forum-brings-no-surprises/

2008 – Increased garbage fees and cut services to save money for the city.  Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2008/08/18/elected-officials-count-on-voters-short-memories/

2010 - Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2010/11/04/accountability-is-the-issue/

2012 Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2012/08/18/the-times-journals-candidate-endorsements/

2012 –Read more at: https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2012/10/24/city-council-votes-to-kick-garbage-system-to-the-curb/

 “Perkins said Martin Environmental, which is contracted with the city for garbage pickup” Read more at:  https://www.selmatimesjournal.com/2023/01/15/update-from-the-mayor-mega-company-will-be-contracted-for-debris-removal-but-it-will-take-time-to-happen/