quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
City have a FB page? Post about it, outline that the contract the city negotiated is potentially going to give the contractor a big windfall through the short deadline by not requiring them to honor paid for services via stickers.

That contractor has money they have accepted for future services, accounting wise they cannot take payments for future services as a profit until it's earned. They hold it in a reserve account, as soon as April 1 deadline hits, any unclaimed sticker money gets released from reserve and goes right to the bottom line.

They know this, and have probably done it before, it's why they want a hard deadline.

Otherwise, you could look for businesses in the area that use a lot of trash, or yard sales, estates etc and sell them at a discount to recover your costs.

I don't have a facebook account so I don't know. I'll ask around and see what everyone else is doing. Thanks

Pros and Cons with each type of payment system.

Our area has a fixed fee for one can and one recycle can per month. If you want additional cans, you pay additional per can per month. So it is somewhat a progressive fee based on usage but:

My two person household rarely if ever fills up the can, while my neighbor with kids fills his to overflowing every week. Also, if we go on a trip, we do not get a credit regardless of how many weekly pickups we miss with no trash. So no system is completely fair until they come up with a truck with a scale that weights and bills by the pickup.

My previous house in the county we had three or four companies that serviced our street. That kinda sucked in that our road was in poor shape and having four times the heavy trucks every week tore it up that much faster, plus it just always bugged me how inefficient it was to have 4 trucks traveling the same area.

quote:

What would you do?

I'd pressure the city to make the company honor the stickers or to force the company to accept stickers, at face, in payment for bags.

I've never lived in a city that had that "buy our bags or get stickers" Everywhere I've lived the service is just tacked onto the water bill and the city went out for bids every couple of years. Where I live now (last 30 some years) the service is "anything, any time" with the exception of hazardous materials and refrigerators that have not be drained of coolent.

I think that if you paid for something that they didn't or can not deliver, that should be refunded.

Sounds like there might be enough people with leftover stickers with a high enough collective purchase cost to get a lawyer interested in suing the city in a class action suit if they don’t offer to reimburse anyone who wants their money back from the stickers. Better 60 or 70% than nothing at all.

City council meeting, a good place to start. Get on the agenda. Any local news media like radio, TV or newspaper? Get them involved.

Our city tried to pull an fast one on the residents a few years ago. Population 12k., important part here.

The city wanted a street improvement project but the mayor and council figured that voters would turn down a millage for street repairs. So their plan was to shift money already in the budget from public safety to streets. Now comes the good part. City finds out that in Michigan municipalities with a population of 15k or less can impose a Special Assessment District over the whole community to fund public safety WITHOUT it being approved by the voters.

Once that came out in the local newspaper, radio station and FB the city council meetings were pretty spicy. Council chambers was packed to the point that the stairs down to council chambers were full elbow to elbow, whole place was SRO.

First meeting, the mayor said that the next meeting would deal with the exact dollar amount, that it was going to be enacted. The following meeting got even uglier, council and mayor decided by one vote to set aside the SAD and put the street millage to the voters in the fall. Voters voted resoundingly “no”, there was much resentment to how they tried to play us which came back on them.