The Snohomish City Council at a meeting in the upper level of the Carnegie Building in September 2022. The council meets at 6 p.m. on the first and third Tuesday of each month at the Carnegie Building, typically in the lower level.
Photo by Michael Whitney.
SNOHOMISH — The city is preparing to ink a deal for trash collection to continue with Republic Services for seven more years to 2031.
The City Council is scheduled to sign the contract at its March 5 meeting.
Service rates will go up April 1.
The new rates for a sample home using a 32-gallon trash can plus recycling and yard waste are proposed to be $41.99 a month ($125.97 quarterly bill), up from $38.45 a month ($115.35 per quarterly bill).
A sample home with a 64-gallon trash can would pay $50.67 per month, ($152.01 per quarterly bill), up from $46.60 per month ($139.20 quarterly bill.)
The default recycling can is 96 gallons in size for Snohomish customers. Yard waste service is available.
Compared to some jurisdictions seeing rate increases, a 9 percent increase is small, Wendy Weiker, Republic’s municipal relationship manager, told the City Council last week.
The trash collection industry is facing labor shortages in finding truck drivers, pressure from national inflation and unpredictability in being able to recoup costs from recycling services. Recyclables such as glass, metal and plastic is crushed, melted or ground up to sell to raw material buyers. Similar to metal scrap prices fluctuating, other raw material prices fluctuate, too.
The annual community cleanup event will be Saturday, April 13.
Republic Services was the only bidder in a recent call for bidders.
WM (formerly known as Waste Management) declined to bid, the city said.
WM spokesman Patrick McCarthy said timing was why WM didn’t bid.
“In this situation, we were disappointed to see timing requirements made it unworkable for us to provide services for the City of Snohomish,” McCarthy said by email. “The time allotted between the award date and contract implementation was unworkable, unfortunately.”
Snohomish’s call for bids was issued Oct. 10 with proposals due just before Christmas.
In related news
The city plans to place “BigBelly” solar-powered compacting trash bins on First Street near the end of March, public works director Nova Heaton told the City Council last week. These can hold more trash than a usual can and also have a receptacle for recyclables.
They will replace cans where to-go containers heavily accumulate.
The Historic Downtown Snohomish Association organization is thrilled to see the bins coming to address garbage overflow, and the bins will add recycling downtown, its director Maygen Hetherington said.
