By Charlene Sims, info@linncountyjournal.com
MOUND CITY – As one of the final steps in his last day as Linn County commissioner, Commission Chair Danny McCullough made a motion to end the trash compactor service in Pleasanton if the city did not sign a contract with the county within 45 days. The motion passed unanimously.
After coming out of executive session with attorney Mark Hagen, McCullough prefaced his motion with regret that this action had to be done. He explained that this had been something that the commission had been working on for a few years.
McCullough said, “We brought in each city, brought them here in a meeting and asked them their opinions. We haven’t had a contract on them since the early or late ‘70s, so we’re just trying to organize everything and do what we need to do that is necessary. We’re just trying to do our job.”
Last fall, County Public Works Administrator Shaun West sent revised contracts to each city where a trash compactor is located. Most of the city councils agreed with the counties stipulations and signed the agreements without question.
However La Cygne and Pleasanton still have not agreed to sign them yet. (Click here to read a related story on La Cygne’s decision on the contract.)
Pleasanton City Administrator Becky Hegwald referred inquiries about the situation to City Attorney Jacklyn Palette, who was not immediately available for comment.
Earlier last year, Pleasanton officials asked about relocating the site of that city’s transfer station. The permit for each site specifies where the compactor/transfer station will be located.
“We made up some contracts for each city to look over and to sign and basically said that they would be put on the permitting process with Linn County,” McCullough said at Tuesday’s commission meeting. “We (Linn County) provide them with the dumpster, the hauling of the dumpsters, the compacting equipment. We also give them a monthly allowance for the employee so we are not trying to change any of that.
“We’re going to pay for the permitting process, have each city educated, if you will, on the whole trash compactor sites and whatnot. That’s kind of what we asked in our permits and our agreements and we had two cities (that didn’t agree to it) and all the other cities agreed to it and didn’t really have an issue with it. There were a few things we had to line out but we have Pleasanton and La Cygne that have not signed the contracts yet.
“Pleasanton came back with some demands and I think we are going to take the approach that if they don’t sign the contract that we will be pulling the trash service out of Pleasanton based on the information we had received from their attorney.”
Commissioner Jason Hightower said, “We are choosing ‘Option C’ that they gave us.”
McCullough added, “Which was they were going to sign to pull it out of Linn County. And this is not something that I want to do or anybody wants to do. But Pleasanton will not agree to the terms, which in short, puts them on the permitting process and that’s about it and so I think it’s ridiculous that they won’t sign it. I think it’s ridiculous where we are at this point where we have to threaten to pull the trash service out of Pleasanton.
“I think it’s a bad move on Pleasanton’s end. And I think that they should try to talk to us about this, but right now I think the approach we have is we’re taking the trash service out of Pleasanton if it’s not signed in 45 days.
“My motion would be to remove the trash service out of Pleasanton if they cannot agree to the contract that we had sent every other city in Linn County within 45 days of today. And I encourage everybody to go to your city council and talk to them and tell them where you stand and give them your opinion. I think it’s important that the trash service stays in Pleasanton.”
Hightower added, “We all feel that way. It’s important that the trash service stays in Pleasanton.”
McCullough said that this was a motion that he did not want to make but he thought it was necessary to move forward with this. He said it was not fair to the other cities what Pleasanton and La Cygne are doing right now.
All commissioners agreed to the motion.
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