| Council's waste service in question |
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| Thursday, 02 October 2008 | |
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A local authority on the Southside has indicated that it could be the first Dublin based county council to outsource its waste management services to the private market. It is understood that at the most recent meeting of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council’s Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) on the Environment, officials told councillors that they may have no alternative but to discontinue the refuse collection service after multi-million euro losses. Cllr Jim O’Leary (FG), who is chairperson of the SPC, said that council management indicated at the meeting that they were seriously considering outsourcing their waste operations to a private company. “The Director of the Environment Department made members of the Environmental Strategic Policy Committee aware of the possibility that the council may have no alternative but to outsource their waste management services to a private operator,” said Cllr O’Leary. The local authority has lost in the region of e10 million since the entry of private waste firms into the market such as Panda and Greenstar last year. The private companies have also succeeded in winning over half of the council’s original base of 70,000 customers. Cllr O'Leary said he believed the local authority should stop providing the service. However, he insisted that it was crucial that an agreement was reached to ensure that the bins of all residents in the county were collected in the future. “It would be better for all concerned if the council simply tendered out the service it now supplies with guarantees that all households would be able to avail of the service,” he said. The local authority has been in negotiations for the last 18 months with a number of trade unions in an attempt to rationalise the service, which would mean that redundancy packages would be offered to about half the council’s current complement of 40 bin men. The assistant director of the trade union IMPACT, Johnny Fox, said both sides had reached an agreement on most aspects of the negotiations. He felt it was unlikely that the council was about to discontinue the service. “The position is that a set of proposals have been put to the union,” he said. “The unions have responded to that proposal. There are a number of issues that have not been agreed and will be referred to the Labour Relations Commission. “I wouldn’t have thought that we have reached a point yet where the council has made the decision [to stop providing the service],” he added. “We have got broad agreement on the vast majority of proposals and there are just a few outstanding issues.” Mr Fox claimed the council has told his union that if they didn’t reach agreement they may have no alternative but to stop providing the service. “But we told them that in our view that would lead to serious industrial relations problems,” he warned. Southside People contacted the council about the matter but they declined to comment. |
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