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County works on garbage bills By SUE WATSON
Staff Writer  | Photo by Sue Watson
Ironing out plan
From
left, county administrator Larry Hall, Ken Jones and Kenetta Glover
work on a plan to hone the garbage billing system. |
The
board of supervisors has hired Ken Jones to reconcile overdue garbage
collection bills and to reconcile the record of who has service and who
does not. Jones produced a stack of cards
containing addresses of active accounts in arrears for three to 12
years. Under Marshal County’s contract with Resourceful Environmental
Services, the county must pay R.E.S. for any household garbage bills it
cannot collect. The county then tries to recover the overdue bills when
a person goes to renew a car tag. Jones said he is looking at accounts overdue by $300 or more - which comes to three years or more going uncollected. There
are many ways households dodge paying up, he said. The account may be
in an elderly relative’s address and name but the person does not own a
car. Daughters or sons living with the relative may have their car tag
registered elsewhere. The renter may move leaving the bill unpaid. A
relative may die and R.E.S. is not called to terminate service. Cans
may be put out on a street and each neighbor claims the container
belongs to the other address. Jones has been
charged with correlating 911 addresses with cans in order to reconcile
the service address with the service record. In cases where an address
has no mail box, no post office box and the person has moved, the bill
most likely belongs to a renter, he said. The county’s job will be to
collect the bill from the property owner or landlord. “We have been attaching (bills) to tags but have not been attaching them to property,” Jones said. There
are instances where a person has been dead five years and R.E.S. has
continued to bill but the relative living in the house has not paid the
bill. The bill collector has difficulty getting these people to even
provide their names. “There are people who do
not have service or a can but their account and service was not
cancelled, so the bill keeps clocking on,” Jones said. “The truck
drivers do not know who has an account and is not paying. A neighbor on
Isom Chapel Road said he had no service, but the guy owed over $1,200.” Administrator
Larry Hall said the county had $32,000 in uncollected bills last month
but some of that is old bills and a lot of those accounts are not
active. “If we can’t get the bills to the right folks, we can’t collect it either,” he said. Chancery clerk Chuck Thomas called the accounts moving targets. “Yes,” said Jones, “because people are steadily moving in and out.” He
said R.E.S. is billing the county for the number of cans it has in
circulation - about 12,500. But there are probably only 11,500 - 12,000
cans actually brought out to the road. Hall
said the county can go to the power company to find out when a person
moved from an address and any billing R.E.S. did to the address when
the property was vacant could be determined by the utility bill. The
county would ask R.E.S. to deduct the garbage fee for months when there
is no power service at an address. Supervisors
said they are trying to get an accurate accounting of billing in an
attempt to lower the $650,000 yearly allotted in the budget for garbage
collections. “I think we need to count cans,” said supervisor Eddie Dixon. In
other business, the real and personal property tax rolls were turned in
to the Marshall County Board of Supervisors a few weeks ago. Assessed
valuations on cars and other personal property such as equipment are
down, according to tax assessor Juanita Dillard. She
said car tag valuations are down about $3 million this year over last
and business and personal property valuations are down about $1
million. Real property valuations, however, gained about $1 million
over last year. The tax rolls and valuations are
used in helping the board of supervisors project the new fiscal year
budget (FY 2010-2011) which will be due in September. |
