Milton residents may soon receive notice of the suspension of the city recycling program due to the recent closure of a facility in Alabama.
City Manager Brian Watkins addressed the city council during Monday night’s executive committee meeting about the current status of the city’s program, which has been available to citizens since the beginning of last year.
Watkins said materials were collected and taken to the Central Landfill in Santa Rosa County in which the city had an agreement with the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority to take the materials to a recycling facility in Montgomery, Alabama. However, the facility has since ceased operations.
“As of right now the ECUA has nowhere to take it,” Watkins said. “The (SRC) Board of County Commissioners will bring this up again and talk about this at their meeting next week. They are trying to find additional solutions with the ECUA on where to take the recycling to actually get it recycled and not just taken to a landfill.”
In the meantime, Watkins provided the council with a rough draft of a letter which would be sent to the city’s recycling customers informing of them of the program’s status.
“If the county cannot come up with a solution with ECUA…then we would recommend we suspend the recycling program until such time that they do reestablish a program to take it to a recycling (facility),” Watkins said. “We would continue our program until the end of March to allow the county to work through their issues.”
Mayor Wesley Meiss said the suspension comes as a disappointment only after just recently starting the program.
“Recycling was a big deal and there was a lot of folks that enjoyed that,” Meiss said. “There is nothing we can do. It is out of our hands as far as we are concerned.”
Should no solution be found by either the ECUA or the county officials, Watkins said there would be no use in having city resources maintain the recycling program.
“If it’s just going to the landfill, there is really no reason for us to be operating another route with more trucks, more men, more everything and having people pay us extra to do it when they could just throw it in their garbage can and have it end up in the same place,” Watkins said.
Council Member Jimmy Messick suggested the council withhold taking action on sending out a letter until next week’s regular council meeting before seeing if a decision is made by the board of county commissioners.
The city’s program lasted nearly one year after being approved by the council as a suggestion by the public works department. Recycling was made available to the more than 3,000 customers who use the city’s waste management services.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Milton may suspend recycling service