Vernon council to revisit mayor’s trash drop-off proposal

Last year’s trash drop-off plan proposed by Vernon Mayor Anthony Rossi will be making its way back onto the Township Council’s agenda soon, said Vernon Township Council President Bill Higgins.

“As president of the council, I put the agenda together and the [trash proposal] will be on the next agenda or the one after that, likely as a discussion item,” Higgins said.

Per Rossi’s proposal, the opt-in program would charge interested residents an annual fee to take up to seven household-size garbage bags a week to the town’s recycling center. Presently, residents who don’t live in a private community with garbage pickup included in their dues hire private haulers to pick up their trash or they drop it off at the Sussex County Municipal Utilities Authority.

The annual fee, Rossi said last fall, was estimated to be $350. He said most residents with private haulers paid between $180 and $200 a quarter.

To gauge public opinion on the matter last summer and fall, the town asked residents to participate in a survey on the township’s website. Rossi said the results were about 3-1 in favor of the plan.

“The idea is for this to pay for itself, and to do that, I think we only need 350 to 400 people signed up,” Rossi said in September.

The process hit a snag in November when some on the council did not see eye to eye with Rossi on how much the program would cost, said Councilman Pat Rizzuto, who was council president at the time.

“We were given information [about the proposed trash drop-off program at the Nov. 10 meeting] that was supposed to have come from the mayor,” Rizzuto said at the Nov. 24 meeting. “I went home and looked at it, did some of the work and there seemed to be a lot of errors.”

Rizzuto said a decision on a project the size of the proposed trash drop-off program should wait until a newly constituted council takes over in January. This year, Sandra Ooms and Carl Contino joined Higgins, Rizzuto and Bradley Sparta on the council.

Rizzuto added he thought Rossi’s plan may require additional use of town personnel at the recycling center during trash drop off. Rossi said the numbers he provided the council included input from the town’s director of public works.

Higgins said he and Sparta have put together some numbers of their own and looks forward to discussing specifics again with Rossi at an upcoming meeting.

“There was some fine tuning of the numbers that needed to be done,” Higgins said. “It is a solid idea that was brought up a couple years ago by another mayor, but it was never formalized. Anthony formalized it and we put numbers together that make sense to us and we’ll share that information with Anthony. If he thinks our numbers are justifiable, then we will support it and put it on.”

Township budget

When the council meets March 23, Rossi will begin discussions as part of the upcoming township budget process. He said there will be a number in his budget for the trash drop-off program.