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The Belmont Banner and Mount Holly News welcome your community announcements. Feel free to email them to us at editor@mybannernews.com.
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City conserves fuel
By THOMAS LARK
- Thu, Jul 10, 2008
BELMONT—With escalating fuel prices showing no signs of relief, city governments everywhere are cutting costs.
And Belmont is no exception, according to David Isenhour. The director of the Belmont Public Works Department, Isenhour said last week that he and City Manager Barry Webb came up with a significant cost-saving measure during the recent process to formulate the fiscal year 2008-09 budget.
It means that Belmont residential customers will now have their yard debris, refuse furniture and other solid waste picked up once every other week instead of each weekday. Isenhour said the move was the only possible option.
“We had to,” he said, citing his department’s fuel costs. “Right now, they’re at about $30,000 a year. That’s at current prices. Our four trucks—two trash trucks, a crawl truck and a street-sweeper—all run on Diesel fuel, which is at $4.35 a gallon now.”
Each of the vehicles’ saddle tanks holds 100 gallons of fuel. Large, heavy and usually laden with solid waste, the trucks don’t get good gas mileage.
“It might be nine to 10 miles per gallon,” said Isenhour, “and they’re new! So you can see how very expensive this gets. This has been a major concern for me, Barry and the whole city council. We all scrutinized this very carefully and saw that we simply couldn’t afford to do other than this Plan B scenario. But I think our citizens will understand. Just be patient. We’ll get it.”
The twice-monthly measure won’t affect the regular emptying of garbage cans, he stressed—only non-garbage solid waste.
And if fuel costs continue to rise? Time for Plan C, said Isenhour, and the worst-case scenario: once a month collection of solid waste.
“And we were running our new street-sweeper every week,” he said. “But now it’s every other week, and that could also become once a month if this situation gets worse.”
To get a schedule of when your solid waste will be collected, call (704)901-2071 and let Solid Waste Superintendent Roger Whisnant know your address or call Belmont City Hall at (704)825-5586.
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