Pottstown trash fees jump 10% in 2023; more hikes to come

POTTSTOWN — Trash collection fees in the borough will rise by 10 percent in 2023 and they will continue to go up for the next five years.

The increase was approved unanimously and without comment during the Jan. 9 borough council meeting. The trash fee hike was included with a package of other fee increases, primarily those connected to the Parks and Recreation Department and all part of a single vote.

The $7.89 quarterly increase — or a hike of $31.56 per year — will bring the quarterly charge for trash, recycling and yard waste collection and disposal from $78.87 in 2022 to $86.76 for 2023.

That’s an annual cost of $347.04 for 2023.

According to Borough Manager Justin Keller, the increase is part of a legal settlement reached between the borough and the borough’s trash hauler, J.P. Mascaro & Sons. The legal dispute arose over the council’s Sept. 12, 2022, vote to exercise an option to extend for one year the three-year contract it signed with Mascaro in 2019.

Although the contract language clearly allowed extension options for one and two years, Mascaro officials argued that the council had pledged not to exercise an extension when it accepted the contract in 2019. Borough officials evidently felt otherwise. but left the door open to negotiation.

The Sept. 12, 2022, council vote came after it considered Mascaro’s submission to a call for bids on a new contract with three-year and five-year options.

Had the council accepted Mascaro’s new three-year contract, the annual price would have been raised to $444.52 in 2023 — representing an increase of $129.04 rather than the $31.56 now in place. Accepting the five-year contract would have raised 2023’s annual costs even more. Mascaro was the sole bidder for the Pottstown contract.

On Sept. 16, 2022, Mascaro filed papers to take the borough to court over the council’s vote to extend the 2019 contract for one year. but the court case didn’t last long.

By Nov. 30, Senior Montgomery County Judge Bernard Moore had signed an agreement reached between Mascaro and the borough to avoid further legal animosity and resulting in a new five-year contract with Mascaro.

In essence, the new contract preserves the annual prices available under the one- and two-year extension options from the 2019 contract, which are significantly less than those laid out in the three-year contract Mascaro submitted in September.

However, the remaining three years of the new contract contain the steep rate increases contained in Mascaro’s five-year 2022 bid submission. By 2029, that will have resulted in an 83 percent trash rate increase over this year’s price, according to Mascaro’s estimates.

But that is still a pretty good deal, according to what Mascaro officials told the council back in September.

At the time, Samuel J. Augustine, director of sales for Mascaro, told the council that due to inflation, the cost of fuel, the labor shortage and the increased cost of disposing of recyclables, that collection prices will likely increase significantly in coming years, as is evidenced by recent contracts in other towns.

For example, in 2021 Lower Pottsgrove Township signed a collection contract with a 54 percent price hike; Souderton saw a 96 percent increase in 2022, and Wyomissing will face a price increase of 182 percent in 2023, according to the information Albert DeGennaro, an attorney for the company, provided to borough officials in September.

“We’ve been seeing 100 percent increases on bids, not 40 percent,” Augustine told the council during the Sept. 7, 2022, work session. “Economic times have really changed and recycling has really changed, it’s vastly more expensive. A (40 percent) increase is an excellent bid,” he said.

“If you wait for two years and go out for bid, the difference in prices will be about $1 million more,” DeGennaro told the council in September. “Don’t be pennywise and pound foolish. You may save money now, but it will cost more when you go out for a five-year contract in two years.”

There is still some discrepancy in pricing. According to the rate table included in the legal settlement, 2023’s quarterly rate should be $81.24, but the rate council adopted is $86.76 — about $5.52 more per quarter.

“The monthly and quarterly fees provided by Mascaro are estimated fees to our customers but they do not include costs the borough incurs for our staff to respond to trash concerns,” Keller wrote in response to a Mercury query about the difference between the two.

However, Keller did not respond Wednesday to an additional query about whether his office could provide a table of the next five year’s price hikes that reflects the actual cost to customers in coming years as opposed to Mascaro’s estimates.