Since the conversation around instituting new fees for trash pickup opened in July, Franklin residents have voiced concerns about illegal dumping and how the city would effectively communicate the change.
Resident Leigh Webb hammered the same concerns before the city council took up the measure at a special public hearing earlier this month.
“How much will that cost the city in terms of cleaning up after illegal dumping is pursued?” he said during the hearing. “I’m hoping that won’t happen, but I see problems.”
After months of hearing these concerns, Franklin City Council approved the new annual fee for trash cans during its meeting on Oct. 13, a move intended to bring more revenue, an amount already allocated in the city’s budget.
Under this updated ordinance, Franklin residents will have to purchase a sticker for their cans in order to have trash regularly picked up and dumped. Otherwise, residents will have to go to the city’s transfer station and dump their trash themselves.
Stickers, which will be paid for annually, are priced based on the size of the trash can. For a 48-gallon can, stickers start at $65; a sticker costs $90 for a 64-gallon can; and $125 for a 96-gallon can. To dump at the transfer station costs $1.25 per 20 pounds of trash and scales up every 20 pounds afterwards.
“The price we came up with per can was based on the total number of cans the city of Franklin has out there,” City Manager Mitchel Kloewer said during the meeting.
The decision aligns the city code with the city budget, which was approved in August. If every can in the city receives a sticker, Kloewer estimates a revenue of $450,000. Tax dollars fund the city’s residential trash pick-up contract with Casella, but budget challenges this year meant the city needed to find new funding.
This isn’t the only turbulent time in Franklin’s solid waste ordinances. In 2023, the council voted to exclude multifamily housing units from municipal trash collection in spite of concerns about the effect on low-income residents.
Christy Mank owns and oversees a residential condominium of three units. She said at this month’s meeting that she feels “singled out” by this ordinance, as she believes her property should not have been classified as multifamily housing.
“I feel a little discriminated against that we wouldn’t have the same opportunity as someone who owns a free-standing unit on its own land,” she said.
Kloewer said he and others on the city council agree that the multifamily housing ordinance should be changed, but officials wanted to set up the sticker system before making other drastic changes to the code.
“It seems like that ordinance put a lot of work on the city that we didn’t need to have. So it was something I did want to circle back around to, and now the council has said they do as well,” he said. “… I think we’re going to come back around to that later this year, and see if the council still believes that’s the way we want it to go.”
Franklin’s new director of municipal services, Megan Boobar, started on Oct. 18 and is going to oversee municipal services like the transfer station. Resident Dean Laughy said the city’s solid waste system hasn’t been guided well in the past, and it should now be reviewed with a new person at the helm.
“This is a perfect opportunity to stop, take a breath, allow our new friend to get on board, really do a fair assessment of what’s going on up there and what we can do with it before we start charging additional money,” he said before the council took its vote.
Bearing in mind those residents who will forego the sticker system and take out their own trash, City Councilor Tim Johnston suggested expanding the transfer station’s hours. Currently, the transfer station’s hours are Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Johnston suggested it should be open five days a week.
“If we’re going to make it mandatory for everyone to buy stickers, and if they don’t, then they’re going to have to take it to the transfer station. The transfer station should be open longer to accommodate those residents,” he said.
Kloewer said in the meeting that he would like to see the sticker program implemented in two months, a sped-up timeline given how late the budget passed this year. He said he would ideally like the program to start in December, but it most likely will kick off in the new year.
