City to host public meeting related to trash pickup complaints

EAU CLAIRE — The City of Eau Claire will be hosting a meeting to allow for public comments on their newly released trash study conducted in response to several trash-related complaints the city has received over the past few years.

“The study has been ongoing,” said Deputy City Manager David Solberg. “It actually started late in 2023. The city hired the Wisconsin Policy Forum to do a study on our trash system to look at our operations and then compare our operations to other peer communities across Wisconsin. We hope this will help see if any changes are warranted with the city’s trash program.”

Solberg said that the city noticed an increase of trash complaints during COVID.

“We only had two major haulers for trash and they were struggling with a lot of the same issues with being able to hire staff to be able to keep up with trash collection duties,” he said. “Subsequently, we had a number of city council members that took phone calls and complaints.”

Jasie Mullen, CEO and owner of Trash on Trucks, said that the problem came when GFL purchased Boxx Sanitation, “where (she) used to work,” and that the two companies that had received the complaints were the two larger companies, GFL and Waste Management.

“The acquisition involved bringing on other employees from other garbage companies,” she said. “Boxx drivers got upset about the buyout and left, and that forced GFL to hire a bunch of new ones from Waste Management.”

She said the transition resulted in a lot of new inexperienced employees mismanaging things at the two companies, resulting in garbage on the road and tipped-over trash cans.

Solberg said many of the complaints had to do with the haulers not picking up the trash until several days past the trash pick-up day.

“If you put your trash out on the street on Monday, it might be Wednesday or Thursday until the haulers were able to pick your trash up,” he said. “As you can imagine, that elicited a lot of complaints.”

More recently, though, the number of complaints against trash hauling places has started to go down. There are now four licensed trash haulers operating in the city of Eau Claire, not including specialty haulers. The two new smaller companies are Trash on Trucks and Earthbound Environmental Solutions.

“The complaints (now) are more on people not following the procedures,” he said. “By ordinance, you can’t keep your trash can in the front yard. Some people are keeping bags of trash outside of the plastic receptacle and just have bags of trash on the ground. Some people are placing large items in the boulevard, like a couch or an old mattress or something, and the haulers aren’t picking it up right away.”

In terms of possible changes to the way the city manages trash collection, Solberg said a number of options are being considered.

Currently, the four privately owned companies can operate anywhere in the city and the contracts are directly between the resident and the trash company.

“Right now, (the city) isn’t divided into zones, so it actually can be in the same area (that) more than one company is picking up on,” he said. “You could have customers from all four providers there.”

Thus, one option being considered is dividing the city into zones and allowing the trash haulers to bid on those zones.

“You could have one hauler that gets three zones, one that gets one, and one hauler gets two,” he said.

Other options include the city purchasing trash trucks and hiring trash professionals to pick up the trash or to have the private trash haulers offer contract bids to run operations throughout the whole city.

Residents may end up continuing to pay the private companies or paying the city.

“There could be a combination of all of these,” said Solberg.

Mullen said that it would be impossible for her company, Trash on Trucks, or Earthbound Environmental Solutions to outbid a bigger company like Waste Management or GFL.

“It will put myself out of business. It would also put Earthbound out of business,” she said.

She stressed that she felt the city wasn’t doing enough to acknowledge that her company and Earthbound has stepped up to solve the problem and that even if she were capable of outbidding the two large trash companies, she would not have the resources to manage the entire city.

“We don’t have complaints,” she said. “The only complaint that Trash on Trucks has is that we have a waitlist, and it’s hard to get our service.”

According to the city’s website, Eau Claire residents currently pay more for trash and recycling pick-up than those in Oshkosh, La Crosse, or Wausau. The implication is that changes could potentially save residents money, but Solberg said that is not certain and suggested that competition might be better to lower the cost.

He added that “Thursday is just the first public step. Before any changes would be considered by the City Council, there’ll be a significant public involvement. We’ll have more meetings and more discussions with the public.”

The meeting will take place in the city council chambers at 6 pm on Thursday.

Other trash hauling companies were not available for response at press time.