At the Thursday, August 20, Peachtree City Council meeting it became clear very early in the meeting that a proposal to move to a single city-wide trash hauler, Amwaste, was dead on arrival. The initial proposal, started at the January Council retreat was to replace the three currently approved waste haulers, Pollard, GFL Environmental, and Republic Services, with a single provider and possibly add additional services, specifically yard waste pickup. Given my interest in failure analysis- why planes and trains crash, electronics fail, and human systems go awry, I listened intently and reflected on what had gone wrong given the vast majority of residents would save money with Amwaste. Using Keep Peachtree City Beautiful (KPTCB) numbers from their budget presentation on August 20, Pollard services 4,044 homes, GFL has 2,638, and Republic has 5,318, all approximate numbers. Using Amwaste’s Request for Proposal (RFP) quarterly cost of $63.45 and Pollard, GFL, and Republic’s current quarterly costs of $75, $72, and $87.60, respectively, the annualized savings for Peachtree City residents by my calculations would be $790,000, roughly equivalent to last year’s millage rollback. Depending on provider, individual households would see annualized savings of $46 to $97. Comments in The Citizen on my last article called this chump change, and I’m still waiting for the checks from those that think it is. Nearly everyone saves money so it should have been a done deal, right? Not so…
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