Monthly bills for biweekly garbage pickup would go down for residents outside Vicksburg’s city limits if the city and Warren County choose the proposal of the city’s current provider, but supervisors say they remain challenged by how to collect fees to cover nonpayments.

Supervisors had directed County Administrator John Smith to round up comparisons of nine offers received March 21 by the city, whose 10-year contract with Waste Management for residential and commercial services ends June 30.

No award has been made.

The county’s interest in the process is that it continue sharing the company’s transfer station on U.S. 61 South. County garbage now is hauled by five small, family-run services likely to dissolve if a single service is used.

The company’s offer breaks down to $11.88 a month for twice-weekly service for county residents if supervisors and the city jointly pick a single hauler, based on comparisons Smith presented to the board Monday. An administrative fee in case both boards opt to have haulers bill county residences directly totals $13.38, with a $1.25 tack-on likely to cover residential nonpayments.

“It boils down to whether you want a single hauler or not,” Smith said, adding the current cost for 4,111 outside the city who contract with Waste Management runs about $22.50 a month. Rates for the Houston-based company came in lower than Jackson-based Advanced Disposal and Aberdeen, Ala.-based Arrow Disposal Service for government-billed pickup. Those offers came in at $13.76 and $20.38, respectively.

Under Warren County’s waste ordinance, private firms serve all non-city addresses. Waste Management’s clientele in the county is the largest, with the rest divided among the five family-run operations. Rates charged by the small haulers have averaged around $16 to $18 in the past decade. For each account, a $1.25 monthly surcharge is tacked onto bills, which is turned over to the county for its costs related to enforcement of solid-waste disposal rules required by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.

A key sticking point came when discussions turned to how to convert the way that fee is collected to a fail-safe way to ensure payment using a single, countywide hauler.

Board attorney Randy Sherard called it “a threshold issue.”

“You’ve got to make some revelation to this group as to how you’re going to finance a change,” Board President Richard George told Smith, directing him to check with MDEQ on how best to cover shortfalls in a single-hauler system.

Despite less overhead and cost of running a six-hauler system for nonmunicipal residents, supervisors clung to arguments of familiarity and versatility as reasons to stick with the current system.

“The single hauler has got a lot of positives,” District 1 Supervisor David McDonald said. “Just the fact that you know who’s your hauler and who you owe.”

“It’s going to be a lot of changes and there’s going to be a lot of upset folks if we go to one hauler,” District 4 Supervisor Bill Lauderdale said. “Those people are used to people coming up the driveway and picking up your garbage right there.”

Approximately 5,517 people have garbage picked up on a regular basis by the county’s six permitted haulers and an additional 1,002 have provided documentation that their household garbage is disposed by legal means, according to numbers calculated in February by the county. Totals represented the first firm statistical breakdown of how many people are paying consistently or can prove they are disposing legally since a massive overhaul of the county’s garbage database began in 2007.

Covering shortfalls from overdue, unpaid garbage accounts was a stated problem for the county until it began placing holds on car tag renewals in December for the first time since the Legislature gave counties the authority in 1993 to do so. From 2008 through 2010, more than $90,000 was moved to the garbage fund from other county accounts to plug holes by non-paying addresses.

Under the plan, residents outside the city who owe garbage fees and try to renew a vehicle registration tag are required to contact the Board of Supervisors to pay it off. Supervisors have said collections have exceeded 30 percent of all outstanding accounts, well beyond the 3.97 percent collected in two years by a private collection agency the board hired in 2008.