The city of Marthasville is opening its contract for trash collection to interested service providers as the city nears the end of a three-year contract with Meridian Waste.
The new contract would …
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The city of Marthasville is opening its contract for trash collection to interested service providers as the city nears the end of a three-year contract with Meridian Waste.
The new contract would be for a three-year period starting in July 2023. The Marthasville Board of Aldermen will select a trash hauler and award a contract during its Feb. 15 public meeting.
Marthasville is among several area cities that either switched to Meridian Waste’s services, or saw Meridian buy out their previous trash collector, within the last five years. Within that time, there have been numerous complaints about the quality of Meridian’s residential trash service, leading the cities of Warrenton and Wright City to hire a different trash hauler.
Rather than simply renew Meridian’s contract, Mayor David Lange recommended that Marthasville solicit bids from other trash haulers as well.
When Marthasville last issued a trash hauler contract in 2020, Meridian submitted a bid with a significantly lower cost than previous provider Grace Hauling. But in the years since, Lange indicated there had been a number of occasions when the city needed to call the company to correct issues or pick up trash that got missed. He said there were especially issues in the first two years of the contract.
“Over the past year it’s gotten a bit better,” Lange noted. “They tend to try hard. It’s just sometimes they don’t deliver.
“I think a lot of it is driver turnover. But that’s all part of it; you’re supposed to provide good service,” Lange added.
The board of aldermen voted 3-0 to solicit trash collection bids, with Alderman Nick Lange absent.
Separately, Marthasville is seeking bids from companies capable of safely demolishing three water towers. City officials say that a new well and 300,000-gallon water tank north of town are now online, and once they’ve had some time to verify the system is functioning correctly, they plan to completely decommission and remove the old water storage systems.
A contractor for the demolition could be selected at the board of aldermen’s Feb. 15 public meeting.
The water tanks to be removed include a 50,000-gallon tank outside city hall, a 40,000-gallon tank at the now-demolished hat factory, and a narrow, 100-feet-tall standpipe tank on the east end of the city.
The city’s rough estimate for the demolition costs is about $40,000 per structure, Mayor Lange said. He said funding for the work was included in a $1.8 million loan for water system improvements that the city was approved for in 2022.
Marthasville has also been applying for grants to assist with the cost and save money, but didn’t receive them, Lange added. He also said that Marthasville has been searching for other cities or water districts that might be interested in buying Marthasville’s old tanks and paying to remove them.
Alderman Leo Meyer noted that the board of aldermen wants to have the new water tank online for long enough to verify there aren’t any issues, before giving the final direction to remove the old towers.
