DeKalb assigns workers to litter duty after once-a-week trash change

The recent switch to one-day-per-week trash pickup in DeKalb prevented residents from having to pay higher sanitation bills and is forecast to save the county more than $5 million annually.

Another $4.9 million could have been saved if DeKalb had laid off trash collectors who are no longer needed, according to a consultant's report completed in March. Instead, the county will reassign about 90 employees, with most of them taking on newly created litter cleanup jobs.

County officials said clearing litter is an important task that wasn’t done until staff became available because trash collection routes are now run once instead of twice weekly. Previously, community volunteers cleaned up waste from neighborhood streets.

“The county has some real needs in terms of litter abatement,” said Interim DeKalb CEO Lee May. “Even with the repurposing of those jobs, we’re still realizing a major savings that’s going to help us in terms of millions of dollars that we can now put toward capital,” such as replacing equipment.

Both May and the DeKalb Commission decided not to cut the county’s workforce before receiving the recommendations from Matrix Consulting, which the county hired to conduct a broad efficiency study.

One section of the 551-page study called for eliminating 108 garbage truck driver and refuse collector positions, which pay median salaries from $34,872 to $29,202.

“There are significant cost savings available to the county by making a transition to once-weekly collection, as routes could be redesigned to cover only half the area covered currently each day,” according to the study.

The transition from twice-weekly trash pickup began July 6, and it covers residents of unincorporated DeKalb and the cities of Brookhaven, Dunwoody and Lithonia. The county is still distributing 65-gallon garbage containers to 170,000 single-family households, a project that's scheduled for completion by the end of this month.

Without the change, fees would have had to go up between $80 and $100 per household from their current rate of $265 a year, said Billy Malone, the director of the DeKalb Sanitation Division. He said fees will now remain stable for the foreseeable future, continuing a decade-long streak without an increase.

The county’s sanitation operations will downsize over time as employees leave and their positions aren’t filled, he said. In the meantime, some workers will move off the back of garbage trucks and onto the streets.

“By putting them out collecting litter, we believe it’s just a good repurposing of these employees that we wouldn’t have been able to do unless these employees became available,” Malone said. “We will make an impact.”

The county will reduce its fleet by about 30 garbage trucks, saving between $5 million and $6 million each year in gas, maintenance, replacement and purchase costs, he said. Garbage trucks cost more than $250,000 each and guzzle fuel, getting only about two miles per gallon.

Commissioner Nancy Jester said sanitation positions don’t need to be eliminated in the short term, and she hopes to see gradual attrition take place.

“I think we need to do that across the board, not just in sanitation,” she said. “We have far too much capacity and far lower levels of competence than we need, so we need to drastically improve what we’re doing and do it with fewer people.”

The county has long planned to institute a litter program in conjunction with the move to single-day trash collection, said Commissioner Kathie Gannon. In addition to disposing stray trash, workers will also remove illegally posted signs.

“In the transition to one-day pickup, there could be more junk on the street, and litter has always been a big problem,” she said.