The city鈥檚 new garbage collector this week introduced its new split-cart garbage and recycling bins as well as its billing system to residents who will be using its service starting Dec. 1.
At Tuesday night鈥檚 City Council meeting, Santa Clara-based Garden City Sanitation Inc. 鈥� doing business here as Milpitas Sanitation 鈥� along with city staff presented how the billing transition would work as the city ends a 30-year waste collection and disposal contract with Republic Services.
Milpitas Sanitation 鈥� which plans to communicate coming changes at community meetings scheduled for Sept. 13, Oct. 18 and Nov. 15 鈥� explained that聽residents will be billed three months ahead, instead of being billed after two months as was previously done under Republic.
Under the new program, the first bill residents receive from Milpitas Sanitation will cover December 2017 through March 2018. City staff explained residents are normally billed every two months retroactively. During this four-month period, customers are going to get one to two bills from the old system and one with the new one, or about three bills. However, city staffers stressed residents were not being overcharged.
For multi-family customers, a recycling coordinator and team will visit all complexes and distribute start-up kits. Multi-family customers will continue to be billed on a monthly basis as will businesses.
In addition, Milpitas Sanitation also showed off the different sized split-garbage carts that separate garbage and food scraps that residents need to pick by Sept. 30.
Residents in single-family homes currently pay $33.89 a month and $3.18 a month for renting the carts, Leslie Stobbe, the city鈥檚 public information specialist, told the council. Under Milpitas Sanitation, depending on which garbage cart size residents choose, the cost can range monthly from $32.22 for an extra small cart to $47.32 for a large cart.
Seniors will pay half the cost of an extra small or small cart, Stobbe said.
Stobbe said the lower cost for the smaller bins is meant to encourage residents to 鈥渞educe waste in their households. That is the reason the majority of cities go to these types of volume based program.鈥�
鈥淲e are looking at reducing the amount of waste we put on the curb and send to the landfill,鈥� Stobbe told the council. 鈥淲e are incentivizing the reduction of waste generated.鈥�
Stobbe said cities that have unlimited garbage disposal as Republic currently offers are rare and more likely found in rural areas, with only Morgan Hill offering such a program in Santa Clara County.
Interim City Engineer Greg Chung added 鈥渁ll cities are seeing an increase because organics are coming out of landfills by 2025,鈥� so those have to be processed separately which have an additional cost.
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