City Council members will vote on a proposed agreement with Peoria Disposal Co. to restore every-other-week recycling, which had been changed earlier this year in parts of town where trash is picked up in alleys. The new agreement will cost an additional $6,198 a month for the city, but that would come out of city coffers this year, and the $18 monthly this year residents are paying for waste collection would not change, city manager Patrick Urich said Thursday afternoon.
Last year, councilors approved a trash-and-recycling contract with PDC that moved from monthly to every-other-week recycling collection — with “curbside” as the specified location for recycling pickup. But residents in parts of the city’s bluffs and south side who have their trash collected weekly in alleys — and previously had recycled there as well — objected to the change, which often required wrangling a full recycling toter a greater distance.
Some also indicated difficulties given the regular on-street parking in those neighborhoods. City officials agreed this spring to work at renegotiating the contract, but that meant temporarily returning those with alley trash collection to a once-monthly recycling schedule, to the consternation of many in those parts of the city. Council members last month approved a brief extension in those talks after Urich said more time was needed to get an accurate count of dwellings in the city getting pickup service.
The total house count, according to data provided to the City Council, is, at 38,800, some 982 homes fewer than was in the original contract, producing $83,470 in savings to the city on per-home pickup costs for the remainder of the year. That offsets part of the $114,460 increase in costs for PDC to collect recycling in the alleys every other week.