City Government

Robert T. Rokovitz, MPA, ICMA-CM

City Seeks Bids for Residential Curbside Solid Waste Collection Services

The City of Chattahoochee Hills provides a variety of services to our citizens. These services include, but are not limited to, police, fire, public safety, public works, parks and recreation, library, planning and zoning, court, parks, building inspections, permitting, stormwater management, and general administrative services. Service the city does not provide includes utilities, such as water, sewer, electricity, cable TV, internet, and sanitation. Not having the last of these, sanitation, as a city service seems to impact some residents more than others.

There are residents in the city who struggle to find and keep a provider that will pick up their household trash on a consistent and reliable basis. Even though this is not a city-provided service, we field a lot of calls from residents asking for assistance. We recognize that many residents may never need assistance from the police, fire, public works, parks, building, permitting, planning and zoning, or court services departments, but everyone accumulates household waste and needs to have a legal avenue for discarding this waste. Right now, the only option is to contract with a private provider, but these seem to be few and far between. The providers who have traditionally provided their service in the past have been pulling their business out of our city in order to take on larger, more lucrative contracts. There are even some of our citizens whose trash service was cancelled for non-payment because the provider lumped them into a City of South Fulton contract even though they are clearly Chattahoochee Hills residents. This quandary has resulted in a request from the Mayor and Council to post a Request for Proposal (RFP) for residential curbside solid waste services.

This RFP was put out Friday, July 12th with a submittal deadline of Friday, August 18th at 12:00 p.m. This RFP is available on the city’s website under the document center. In brief, the city is seeking an exclusive provider for solid waste services throughout the city with the exception of private property and/or communities that are part of an HOA that provides this service. Should the RFP yield a provider, all residents will be required to subscribe to this service. While we do not know what the cost of this service will be, we anticipate it being around $45 per quarter, or about $180 per year. Billing for this service would be handled annually and included in property tax bills provided through the Fulton County Tax Commissioner’s office. Since this will be an exclusive franchise, meaning no provider other than the one awarded by the Mayor and Council can execute these services within the city limits, we will also require of the provider a 3% franchise fee paid to the city. Of course, the RFP does not guarantee trash service, but is instead a request for qualified and responsive bidders, should there be any interest in serving our city. This has not been done to date because as a city of 60 square miles with 40 miles of narrow gravel roadways, many of which have no outlets, Chatt Hills presents many challenges for a business model that prefers more density and less geographic area to cover. Additionally, when we exclude areas that are private or have a private HOA, we only have around 1,000 households, equating to an estimated $180,000 per annum revenue generation for the prospective provider to cover all that territory every week. Stay tuned; this process is currently ongoing.