Oskaloosa City Council Takes Up Solid Waste Debate Once Again
Oskaloosa City Hall
Oskaloosa, Iowa – Changes to the solid waste code have found their way back to the attention of the Oskaloosa City Council.
The proposed changes have been in committee with the council for months and appeared all but forgotten, when the discussion concerning the Oskaloosa Water Board took center stage for the past few months.
Oskaloosa City Manager Michael Schrock says the council reviewed the code and then submitted their suggestions for changes, and that was the conclusion of the last work session.
Schrock says he then sent out the code shortly after the work session and asked the council members to return their comments concerning the code. As stated earlier, the discussions over sanitation fell quiet while the council explored options over the water board.
“The sanitation issue was pushed off,” while debate over the water board was happening says Schrock. Currently, the debate over the future of the Oskaloosa Water Board has calmed and Schrock says, “I used that opportunity to come back to the sanitation item and try to get it resolved.”
“So what I was expecting to happen at the work session was they were going to just talk about what code changes they wanted to do, which would be more or less minimal. I thought we’d talk about having garbage pickup only on certain days. That we’d have enforcement move just to seven days instead of thirty,” says Schrock who didn’t expect many changes.
As was discussed in the work session, the council then decided upon looking for other examples of single hauler RFP’s after discussion of sectioning off the city into quadrants.
The nearly year long process has gone from a study by students from the University of Iowa to a discussion in the Public Projects Committee, where they had outlined five goals.
- Less Traffic
- Higher Recycling Volumes
- Uniformity of Containers
- Regular Pickup
- Enforcement of Problems
Schrock has since then circulated to the council members examples that other communities use for their sanitation collection. “I think that’s the first step. Get those examples out there.”
Schrock says that after the council has had a chance to review those examples, “we need to come back in work session again and talk about the level of service they’d like to see.”
Public opinion is always a concern for council members when making such a decision and Schrock agrees. “I think they’ll hear from people and I think that influences the discussion.”
