County off the hook for city trash pickup

The Boone County Sheriff’s Department, the county jail and Juvenile Justice Center have had their garbage removed for free by the city of Columbia for the past 20 months. The county has received no invoice from the city since December 2004 and will not have to pay for the months the city missed.

This translates into a county savings — or a city loss — of about $9,000.

In late 2004, when Columbia annexed the land that includes the county facilities, the city began collecting their trash. The city delivered its services as planned, but the county never saw a single bill.

Boone County senior buyer Heather Turner said she contacted the city in May 2005 to find out why no invoice had been sent. She said she spoke with someone from the solid waste utility, who told her that he would try to activate the county’s account and that the county wouldn’t be responsible for the five months from January until May 2005.

“We never received a bill since,” Turner said.

Turner said she later contacted the city “numerous times” in 2005 to see why the county still had not received a bill, but she received no response.

“I just didn’t know what else to do about it,” Turner said. “We made contact numerous times, but it wasn’t resolved.”

It’s resolved now. Mary Ellen Lea, the collection superintendent for the city’s solid waste utility who will soon become chief operations engineer for the Public Works Department, said Wednesday that the city will immediately activate the account for the facilities. She said that when they were added as new customers in 2004, the city failed to enter their billing information into its computer.

Lea was unsure why the county’s previous calls changed nothing. She said she learned of the problem when she was considering whether to introduce a recycling program for the jail, which would reduce its solid waste bill. When she went to see how much the jail was paying per month, she noticed it wasn’t being billed at all and realized there was a problem.

Lea said the city won’t charge the county retroactively.

“If the mistake is not the fault of the customer, we don’t backbill,” she said.

County Auditor June Pitchford said money budgeted for trash removal for the first year was returned to the general fund. If not used, money budgeted for trash removal in 2006 will also be returned to the general fund.