The cost of hauling trash away each week is going up for both residential and commercial customers served by the Cullman County Sanitation Department.

At its regular meeting Tuesday, the Cullman County Commission unanimously approved a $3 per-month cost increase for regular residential garbage service customers, and a 20 percent increase for commercial customers.

It’s not quite an across-the-board price bump: Senior residential customers will continue to pay the same monthly rate as before. Pickup services for an additional trash bin will stay at the current $7 per month rate. Commercial roll-off container costs will also remain the same.

The increase, said commission chairman Jeff Clemons, comes after a decade of keeping county trash pickup costs level, and was calculated by retroactively applying the annual increase in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) to that time period.

“Anytime you raise rates, people are not going to be happy,” said Clemons. “It isn’t something that we want to do, but we don’t have much of a choice. With the CPI going up every year, and expected to go up more, eventually it catches up with you. You can’t continue to keep rates level in that environment and still run a service.”

For residential customers, the new rates mean monthly trash pickup rates will increase from $12.01 to $15.01 per month, though senior citizens — who pay $7.82 per month for pickup services — are exempt, and will continue to pay that same rate.

Commissioners said that the increase is intended to bring the department’s revenues in line with its annual operating costs, which this year have seen an approximate $500,000 shortfall in a sanitation budget of approximately $6.5 million for the current, soon-to-end fiscal year. Price increases in future years are built into the measure the commission approved Tuesday, with each year’s potential increase pegged to the annual change in the rate of inflation measured by the national CPI.

Part of the reason for the current shortfall is the county’s debt service on its recently-implemented fleet of automated residential garbage pickup trucks. In 2019, the commission approved a $4.9 million overhaul of its former three person per-crew trash pickup service, switching to automated vehicles that each can be operated by a single person. That initial fleet of vehicles was purchased all at once, and commissioners agreed that the county should secure the needed revenue to be able to replace the vehicles, as they age, in order to avoid the need to borrow such a large sum all at once in the future.

Commissioners said recent increases in the cost the county pays to Cullman Environmental, Inc., the local company that owns the Cullman County Landfill, also contributed to the decision to raise rates.

“There’s not any fixed-price structure in our contract with Cullman Environmental,” said Clemons. “They’ve been going up in cost since 2012 at a rate of about three to four percent. But this year, it jumped up to 6.8 percent, which for us is a huge increase — and we don’t even know about these increases until we get the bill.

“One thing I really hope to stress is that we were able to keep our senior rates the same, which is a big deal because we have so many seniors in Cullman County who live on a moderate or fixed income,” he added. “And our new rates will still be about a dollar cheaper than what customers pay in the City of Cullman — and less expensive than what people pay in Walker; in Blount; in Winston — cheaper, really, than most of our surrounding counties.”