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VALLEY — Members of the Valley City Council on Monday took turns complaining about the service provided by AmWaste over the past year. In their first meeting of the new year, members of the council expressed satisfaction that the city has a new solid waste provider for 2023. AmWaste’s  contract with the city has expired. C&C Sanitation of LaGrange will be doing the service this year, but AmWaste still has some closing out to do.

AmWaste still has some final trash pickups to make in Valley and then must collect their roll-out carts. The city’s new contractor, C&C, has been distributing their carts and has started collecting trash in some parts of town.

Valley residents are being advised to not put any trash in their AmWaste can if it’s empty and to wait until their C&C can is in place, if it’s not already.

In some places in the city, pickups have been missed for several weeks.

The trash cans of these residents are overflowing with bags of trash piled up by the can.

“Our previous provider, Mr. Greenjeans, gave us far, far better service than we got from AmWaste,” said Mayor Leonard Riley.

Riley said there will be a price increase for garbage collection starting in April but that citizens won’t be charged until then.

“We will make it right for our citizens,” he said. “I apologize for the kind of service you have been getting. The service from AmWaste was awful, and we feel we owe our citizens a break because of that.”

It was a consensus among the council members that December was the worst month yet.

Council Member Jimmy Gilson said AmWaste missed his house for more than 10 days. His roll-out cart was completely filled, and he had bags of trash piled up next to his can before AmWaste came by to pick it up.

Several members of the council said they were glad the city was going with another contractor and that they had gotten quite weary of getting complaints from their constituents over the poor quality of service received in 2022.

They understood where their friends and neighbors were coming from – they’d experienced poor service, too – but they had run out of answers for AmWaste’s failure to perform up to expectations.

“AmWaste gave us terrible, terrible service,” said Council Member Jim Jones.

Council Member Jim Clark asked the mayor if the city has held back payments to AmWaste due to the poor service.

Riley said that would be taking place because of what had happened in December.

“We are doing this for our citizens who were not served well,” he said. “They missed my house Christmas week and came back twice the next week. They emptied it a second time when there was nothing in it.”

Riley said seeing such gross incompetence angered him to the point of going to AmWaste’s main office and complaining directly to management. That frustrated him even more.

“They acted like they didn’t know what I was talking about,” he said.

Clark said he had gone out to talk to the pick-up crew the last time they’d come by his house.

“They knew they’d lost the contract, but they were nice about it,” he said.

Clark said several streets in his district had been missed over and over again.

To see that this didn’t happen in their last month as contractor, Clark’s wife followed the truck around to make sure they didn’t miss any Shawmut streets.

“I hate it that we have to do all this trash talking,” said Jones, “but what else can we do? I’m glad we will make things right for the citizens by not charging them for now.”

“I can assure you I have gotten my share of phone calls on this,” said Council Member Marquetta Madden.

“I’m just glad we have another provider,” said Gilson.