Trash pickups under new contracts go smoothly, Smithtown officials say

The first week of garbage collection in Smithtown under new seven-year contracts was largely successful, town officials said.

"We had people complain because they can’t hear" the new, quieter garbage trucks and rush their garbage cans out for morning collection, town spokeswoman Nicole Garguilo said. Some residents also said the trucks came before they had brought their cans out, causing them to miss collection, she said. "It takes some getting used to — residents get to know their carters." Residents can solve some of those problems by setting their cans curbside the night before, as the town collection schedule suggests.

Smithtown will pay $5.3 million per year for residential pickup under new contracts with five carters. Brothers Waste Services, T&D Doherty, Total Collection and Alpha Carting will cover most of the 36,500 homes in unincorporated sections of the town and in the Village of the Branch, and Winters Brothers will handle about 1,100 homes in the villages of Head of the Harbor and Nissequogue. Town officials chose the companies after they won competitive bids last year.

The town funds residential pickup through a solid waste fee, attached to the property tax bill, set at $485 for 2021, a $51 increase over the prior year. The fee also covers disposal, yard waste pickup, recycling and Smithtown’s administration of its waste programs. Mike Engelmann, the town’s solid waste coordinator, said that the fee increase was driven by the rising cost of disposal and carters’ labor. In particular, he said, New York State several years ago erased a distinction between drivers’ helpers and drivers, entitling the helpers to the same higher prevailing wage as drivers.

Smithtown’s seven-year contract periods are intended to be long enough for carters to amortize the cost of equipment, which can run as high as $400,000 per truck.

The new contracts, which took effect Jan. 1, formally ended a period that was sometimes tumultuous for town officials and lawyers, if not residents. The owner of one carter pleaded guilty to a felony corruption charge in 2019 after a sting operation by town and Suffolk County authorities and was forced to sell his company; another carter announced Dec. 31, 2019 in one-sentence letter to the town that it was discontinuing service for 2020.

In both cases, town officials replaced the carters, ensuring that garbage pickup continued with minimal disruption.

Engelman was upbeat in an interview last week. He had some reason to feel that way: 22 new, compressed natural gas garbage trucks rolled on town streets, delivered on time despite earlier fears that COVID-19 would snarl procurement. And on one of the highest-volume weeks of the year — made higher because the New Year’s Day holiday had fallen on what would have been a pickup day — the collection system had snapped into action.

"My fingers are crossed, after the year we had," he said.