Franklin preparing new garbage bid

BY DIANA GOOVAERTS
FRANKLIN — The Franklin Borough Council is moving forward with an effort to prepare bid specifications for a new garbage pickup contract.
According to Councilman Robert Dabinett, the borough is drafting specifications for a new three-year contract with a one-year extension option. The guidelines would call for a return to two days of pickup service on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in a move Dabinett said is aimed at creating a more reasonable schedule to attract more bidders.
Service to the Franklin Meadows Condominium Association would not be included in the borough's new garbage contract at that community's request, Dabinett said.
Dabinett said the borough is planning to ask bidders for weekly solid waste and bulk pickup, biweekly recycling pickup, and solid waste pickup at Franklin Elementary School on a daily basis Monday through Friday while school is in session from September through June.
The borough will seek either a lump sum bid or an alternate billing bid, Dabinett said. A lump sum contract is an option in which the garbage hauler owns the garbage after pickup and is responsible for reporting what proportion of a given load is from each town. In an alternate billing scenario, Dabinett said, the bidder would be the garbage hauler only; the borough would still own the garbage and would pay the Sussex County Municipal Utilities Authority (SCMUA) for the waste directly.
According to Councilman Michael Rathbun, the town could potentially benefit from an alternate billing scenario because it would have more transparency around how much garbage it is actually disposing.
Unlike lump sum drivers who give proportional estimates for how much trash from each town is collected in a given load, Rathbun said drivers in an alternate billing scenario are prohibited from picking up waste from more than one town in a given load. Load figures impact how much money the borough receives in the formm of recycling grants from the state, he said, since the grants are distributed based on a municipality's ratio of waste to recyclables.
According to Franklin's 2016 budget, the borough was expecting to receive around $12,000 in recycling tonnage grants from the state. That figure could go up if the borough's waste to recycling ratio is improved through more accurate measurements, Rathbun said.
Dabinett said the council also wants to include an option for bidders to exclude bulk waste pickup in their bids. If a bid without bulk pickup was to be selected by the council, Mayor Nicholas Giordano said the Borough would supply bulk waste pickup itself via the municipality's Department of Public Works.
Giordano said municipal control of bulk waste pickups could potentially help the borough cut off “importers of garbage” through the use of tag or sticker systems. Rathbun said the borough would also likely be able to lower its disposal fees through such a system, since bulk items wouldn't be commingled with solid waste. According to SCUMUA's 2016 fee schedule, mixed loads of waste are charged at the highest rate based on content, meaning a load of commingled solid and bulk waste would be charged at a bulk waste rate of $115 per ton, compared to the solid municipal waste only rate of $96 per ton.
Giordano said the Borough is aiming to prepare and bring the final bid specifications before the Council for a vote by the first meeting in September.