City refuses to pay last bill for shoddy garbage service

The City of Port Washington will not pay the last bill it received from Waste Management, given the poor service it received from the company since it took over the city’s contract last year, City Administrator Tony Brown said Tuesday.

The money that would have gone to the $50,000 bill will be used to offset the significant amount of staff time needed to handle issues “as a result of their lack of performance,” Brown said, and to fund the delivery of new garbage and recycling carts and collection of old ones.

The city in September terminated its contract with Waste Management after a year in which officials said the firm consistently failed to collect refuse and recycling in many neighborhoods — sometimes picking up items on one side of the street and not the other, other times leaving refuse at the side of the street for days.

The city then hired Harter’s Fox Valley Disposal, which has been collecting garbage and recycling since Sept. 17.

Things are running smoothly again, Brown said, and it’s a welcome change.

“I haven’t heard any real complaints,” he said.

As of Friday, Brown said, Harter’s has delivered 8,000 new garbage and recycling carts to households in the city.

By Wednesday, the firm was expected to largely be done picking up the old carts, he added.

Harter’s will be repurposing some of the old carts, returning a few to Waste Management and destroying and disposing of the rest, Brown said.