MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The Morgantown Utility Board has finalized it’s agreement to take over billing for trash and recycling for residential Republic Services customers in Morgantown.
The Morgantown City Council unanimously adopted the memorandum of agreement Tuesday night.
“It’s good that we’re bringing some closure to this,” said City Manager Paul Brake. “We’ve worked on the agreement renewal for, since I’ve been here, about 13 months or so. So it’s nice to finally wrap up that project.”
The agreement includes all residential customers in Morgantown, regardless of whether or not they have an overdue bill.
“They’re really working very cooperatively with us to meet our objective of what is the best business model in order to collect subscriber fees and to deal with… instances of deliquincies,” Brake said.
MUB will now add a line item to the eligible customer’s bills to include the trash fee. In the past, Republic employees would be tasked with determining what accounts were delinquent — then leaving that trash behind.
“This enables us to ask Republic to pick up all residential trash, whereas right now if someone wasn’t paying they wouldn’t pick up the trash and the trash would remain at the curb,” Brake said.
MUB has the ability, through a customer’s social security number, to report non-payment through collections to go onto an individual’s credit report. This replaces Republic having to go through the painstaking process of taking someone to court over unpaid bills, or city police being required to chase down delinquint customers.
According to the agreement, there is an expected price increase, which will vary depending on the customer.
“So it’s anywhwere from three cents to nine cents a month that would be slightly higher with MUB handling that, and that’s it,” Brake said. “So it would be virutally the same.”
The changes go into effect May 1.