May 18, 2013
Some big changes in trash pickup are on the way for folks in Augusta.
These changes affect lots of people living in Richmond County.
First, if you live in the Goshen area or off Jimmy Dyess Parkway, you may be used to paying a private company to pick up your trash. Now you are included in the city's pickup route and you'll have to switch over and pay the $276 yearly fee to have your garbage picked up.
And for downtown businesses, instead of having trash picked up three times a week, that will now be cut to two days, and your fee will no longer be included in property taxes.
And a change for everyone in Augusta: if you have yard waste that needs to be picked up, make sure you have it in paper bags, not plastic, or the city won't pick it up...and there will be a limit to how much bulk waste they will take.
Why all the changes? Augusta's Solid Waste Director Mark Johnson tells us, "These were things as we went into the new contract, we needed to fix, process improvement, lessons learned, things that became cost prohibitive."
There's one other change to mention; that's holiday pickup. Instead of trucks not showing up during holidays, pickup will always resume the day after the holiday. That means if a holiday is on a Friday, there will be pickup on Saturday, even though Saturday may not be a normal pick up day.
Most of these of service changes won't take place until June.
