Truck mechanical issues blamed for garbage pickup backlog in Hoover

Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato on Wednesday night said the city is working with its garbage contractor, Amwaste, to figure out a long-term solution to the trash woes that plagued the city over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

An Amwaste official told the Hoover City Council that mechanical issues with garbage trucks were the reason why thousands of residents didn’t get their garbage picked up on schedule over the past week.

Amwaste normally has 14 trucks to pick up garbage in Hoover, but a “perfect storm” of problems hit the company all at once, said Rick Sweeney, Amwaste’s vice president over operations in Alabama and Louisiana.

Holidays are always a challenging time because the company doesn’t pick up garbage on holidays, and there are no makeup days in Hoover, Mountain Brook and Pelham because the trucks are on a regular schedule to run six days a week in those cities, Sweeney said.

Normally, the company prepares to handle higher volumes on the second pickup of the week for those houses that had service skipped on the holiday, but this year, some vehicles were stuck at third-party repair shops for warranty maintenance, and a plethora of maintenance issues hit the trucks that were in service, Sweeney said.

Ninety-eight percent of Amwaste’s trucks in Hoover are less than three years old, but there were just a lot of problems at once, he said. Sweeney apologized for the failure to deliver service as promised and said he understands the frustrations of residents and city officials.

After being flooded with calls about missed service, Brocato put the one garbage truck the city of Hoover owns into service this past weekend and called in help from the city of Alabaster, which handles its own garbage pickup. Alabaster sent four of its garbage trucks to help, and between the city’s truck, Alabaster’s trucks and Amwaste’s remaining trucks, they worked through New Year’s Day in an effort to get caught up.

The extra trucks from Hoover and Alabaster together picked up garbage from about 3,500 houses, Brocato said.

Amwaste by Tuesday was able to bring in four extra trucks from Georgia to get back to a normal trash pickup schedule, Sweeney said. The company ran normal schedules Tuesday and Wednesday and believes that, for the most part, it is caught up, he said.

Brocato said he’s not trying to make excuses for the failure in service this holiday season, but there are indeed some very challenging issues facing the trash industry right now. The city will continue working with Amwaste and the Cahaba Solid Waste Disposal Authority, which contracted with Amwaste on behalf of the city, to get more efficient in identifying missed houses and using more innovative technology, he said.

There need to be better contingency plans in place for mechanical and personnel issues, he said.

One option being considered as a remedy is 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, Brocato said.

That may require more vehicles, so those costs will need to be analyzed, he said.

Some people are quick to say that Amwaste needs to be replaced with another company, but that’s not practical, Brocato said.

Amwaste is a big company that serves a lot of people, and “we believe they have the desire to get everything corrected,” the mayor said. Sweeney himself lives in Riverchase, and “he has pride in the city where he lives, and he wants to get it right as well,” Brocato said. “We’re going to work with them to see what we can do.”

Under Amwaste’s contract, the city has the option to issue fines for missed service, but tracking the exact amount of time garbage went without being picked up is a cumbersome process, and the burden falls on residents and the city to report both missed pickups and the actual time their trash was picked up, he said.

“I would rather spend my energy and my staff’s energy on getting these things corrected,” he said.

Some residents have complained that the holiday lapse in service is indicative of problems they have been experiencing in non-holiday times.

Brocato said this was an unusual situation and said Amwaste has 9,000 residential pickups a day in Hoover and has a 99% efficiency rate. The city pays Amwaste about $8.7 million a year for that service, officials said.

Councilman Casey Middlebrooks thanked Brocato for his efforts to attack the problem, bring in extra resources to try to resolve it and keep the council and residents informed about progress.

Brocato, a former battalion chief with the Hoover Fire Department with training in crisis management, had Hoover fire trucks drive around their territories throughout the city to scout out which areas had not received trash pickup and had people in the city clerk’s office and Public Works Department come in over the weekend to help manage and respond to the situation.

Amwaste provides residential garbage pickup to numerous other jurisdictions in the Birmingham-Hoover metro area, including Clanton, Fultondale, Homewood, Lipscomb, Mountain Brook, Pelham, Trussville, Vestavia Hills and unincorporated Jefferson County. Amwaste serves all of those areas, except Lipscomb and unincorporated Jefferson County, through a contract with the Cahaba Solid Waste Disposal Authority. Amwaste has a total of 67 trucks, including boom trucks, providing residential service to these communities, Sweeney said.

See the full video of Wednesday night's Hoover City Council meeting on The Hoover Channel YouTube page.