Amwaste taking steps to address garbage pickup problems in Hoover, other cities
Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato and officials for the city’s garbage contractor, Amwaste, on Monday night said they believe they have identified the issues that have been causing garbage pickup problems and are taking steps to address them.
One of the big problems was truck maintenance issues that kept Amwaste from having 14 garbage trucks on the streets every day, said Paul Barber, Amwaste’s district manager for Alabama, in a report to the Hoover City Council.
Additional trucks were brought in from out of state, and the service being provided is getting better, Barber said. “We’ve dramatically decreased the missed pickups,” he said.
“We’re going to commit to 14 [trucks] and get 14 out there every day,” Barber said. “We know it’s important. It’s important to everybody in the community, and it’s important for us as well.”
Amwaste also is in the process of building a new 10-bay maintenance shop at its landfill off Interstate 22 and Coalburg Road to allow for faster repairs and also is looking for additional property for another maintenance facility elsewhere in Jefferson County, Barber said. The company also has hired three more experienced maintenance technicians in the past two days, he said.
Other changes are being made in regard to personnel, Barber said. Amwaste is switching from having two 12-hour shifts every day to three eight-hour shifts in an effort to keep workers from being fatigued, he said.
The company also is hiring an additional dispatcher to handle problems that arise, such as missed pickups or carts that need repair, he said. This dispatcher will respond to complaints in a more personal way than the canned, computer-generated responses that have been being sent, he said. That dispatcher should start within the next two weeks, he said.
Amwaste also is hiring an additional route manager and has identified a couple of workers that need to be retrained, he said.
A new system is being put in place to guard against and deal with missed pickups, Barber said. Each truck driver will begin calling their route manager 20 minutes before they finish their route, and the route manager will use the truck’s GPS system to verify that all streets on the route were visited, he said.
Route managers also on each morning will check with the Hoover city clerk’s office for any missed pickups reported the previous day and will report back to the city clerk’s office when those pickups have been completed, Barber said. Route managers also will check to see if the same addresses have missed on multiple occasions and personally verify pickup at those addresses, he said.
Amwaste also soon plans to return to regular twice-a-week service on only four days of the week (Monday and Thursday for half the city and Tuesday and Friday for the other half). That would leave Wednesdays and Saturdays as options for makeup days when pickups are missed.
Councilman Casey Middlebrooks asked the Amwaste officials the timeline for this change, saying he is in favor of the change but doesn’t want to make a change too quickly if Amwaste doesn’t have the equipment or manpower to handle it yet.
Rick Sweeney, Amwaste’s vice president over operations in Alabama and Louisiana, said new routes are still being redrawn and he anticipates that change will occur in mid-to-late February.
The mayor said he is grateful there are people who get out on the streets and pick up the city’s garbage every day.
“It’s very, very difficult, but it’s very, very important, and we have to get it right,” Brocato said. “We’ve had more trouble than we really want that’s occurred over the last few months.”
City officials and the Cahaba Solid Waste Disposal Authority, which has the actual contract with Amwaste on behalf of Hoover and seven other cities in the area, have been meeting with Amwaste to find solutions to the problems.
“We want them to be successful,” Brocato said. “We don’t want to go into the trash hauling business … We want to do everything we can to help them, and we expect them to do everything they can get to get it right.”
The biggest problem the city has experienced is communication, the mayor said. The city has a good system to record complaints from residents, but those complaints weren’t getting to the right people, and there weren’t enough managers to monitor employees and address problems, he said.
“We know that we’re going in the right direction,” Brocato said. “We’ve seen a good bit of improvement the last eight to 10 days. But again, this can’t be a weeklong improvement. It’s got to be consistent.”
See the video of Amwaste's report at Monday's Hoover City Council meeting on The Hoover Channel YouTube page.