The Kodiak Island Borough is set to reject proposed changes to its contract with Alaska Waste, which handles garbage and solid waste services in Kodiak. The decision comes after months of discussion and ongoing public complaints.
Some residents and business owners, who are already unhappy with Kodiak’s trash company, will have to wait for changes to local garbage service.
Since the beginning of this year, in January of 2024, the Borough’s Solid Waste Contract Committee, which is made up of assembly members James Turner, Scott Smiley, and Larry LeDoux along with borough staff Dave Conrad, and Aimee Williams; has been evaluating and discussing the contract between the borough and Waste Connections of Alaska, also known as Alaska Waste. The original contract was first signed in May of 2019 and amended about two years later.
Over the last few months, the borough has been mulling a second amendment to the contract that seeks to adjust rates, clarify inconsistencies, as well as simplify the language throughout the contract. But many have given public comment to the borough in recent weeks stating that the proposed contract changes are not simple or easy to understand.
That includes Kodiak resident Coral Chernoff, who expressed her concerns to the borough regarding this contract several times in the past nine months. Chernoff also mentioned her ongoing court case in small claims court involving her trash collection at her property and Alaska Waste.
“I’m going to touch on a few things, but besides this, I could go line by line with that amendment and within every five lines there is an issue," Chernoff said. "I can find an issue. I found a lot of them.”
Others complained about the potential for customer rates to increase significantly should the amended changes be made to the contract. But Borough Manager Aimee Williams clarified that some of those proposed rate increases were due to errors in the initial contract that were not corrected.
"So one of the comments that was made, it was that the first amendment doubled the price and the second amendment will double it again, and those facts just aren't there. But there is something in the first contract that is very noteworthy. When that contract was signed from the table of contents on, there were a lot of inconsistencies," Williams said. "The table of contents was wrong. The math in the table to figure out what the rate was, was wrong. So a lot of that is updated in this second amendment.”
Still, members of the public and the Assembly were not satisfied with the proposed amendment to the Alaska Waste contract and agreed during a work session on Oct. 10 to scrap the changes altogether.
Although no official action was taken at that meeting, Williams summed up what happens next.
“And then we’ll postpone them indefinitely," she explained. "For those subjects, we’re going to kind of start over from scratch and bring in a new, more streamlined amendment just to focus on the customer count, to make sure we are in control of how those rates go up.”
If the Borough Assembly postpones the contract amendments indefinitely during its meeting on Thursday evening, Oct. 17, then that will require the assembly to start over before making any potential changes to the Alaska Waste contract.
Meanwhile, the current contract which was most recently updated in 2021, will continue to be in effect.