Opinion: Residents with late garbage bills should receive a more detailed accounting
By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette
Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025 – As I start this column, I just completed writing a check to Nelson Fiscal Court for the past due garbage bills my wife and I have been assessed — and more recently advised the county will take legal action to collect unpaid amounts.
In Nelson County we have universal garbage collection, which means everyone is required to use — and pay for — garbage collection. It was an excellent move years ago when it began, and frankly, I have absolutely no problem paying for the service.
But I do have a problem when you receive a letter from county government advising you that you owe a sizeable amount for unpaid garbage bills without an accounting of what months were unpaid.
I never purposely decided not to pay our garbage bill. How the hell did my wife and I not pay that bill?
That was the question that Nelson County Judge-Executive must have asked himself after he took office and discovered the county had many thousands of dollars of unpaid garbage bills — going back a number of years.
In Nelson County, the garbage bill shows up on utility bills sent out by Salt River Electric, KU and perhaps other entities. When you pay your light bill, it includes your garbage bill — or that’s the intent. Apparently, that did not always happen, particularly if you were paying your Salt River utility bill when it was late but before service was cut off.
From what I understand, when Salt River Electric customers paid their utility bill late, the utility only collected the utility bill. On the surface, it appears they did not collect the garbage bill when customers paid late.
The county has had an arrangement with Salt River (and others) to include the garbage fee on its utility bills, and for years that arrangement has worked well.
As you might imagine, I was surprised to get a notice from Nelson Fiscal Court my wife and I had unpaid garbage bills.
I’m sure other county residents also received notices from the county for unpaid garbage bills. Again, I have no problem paying what I owe, but is it wrong to ask them to provide you with what months were unpaid? When you get a demand for payment, is it unreasonable to expect a list of what months weren’t paid?
I don’t think so.
And to that end, last year during a fiscal court meeting I asked the court to provide residents with past-due bills an accounting of the months and years they had an unpaid bill. After all, you expect a business to provide you with a bill citing the dates of service and which were not paid.
Since last summer, I received one past due garbage bill notice from Salt River — the first we had ever received in our 25 years as customers — at several from county government,
Ironically, the dollar amounts on the county’s notices have varied widely. The most recent notice I’m paying today actually had a lower dollar amount than any of the previous notices from the county.
As far as I know, there was never a public explanation of why or how garbage bills were not collected. I’m sure the reasons are many, (Editor’s note: Hutchins offers an update on this topic on his most recent edition of “Around the County” with Tim Hutchins video. Click here to view). And perhaps some people may have intentionally not paid the bill out of some sort of protest for being forced to pay for service they did not want.
The residents of the county deserve to know the total dollar amount of unpaid garbage bills, and more importantly, what steps the county has taken to insure the situation doesn’t happen again.
Its not about assessing blame or fault — the situation is what it s. But in my opinion, as taxpayers, we deserve to know changes have been made to insure a similar lapse in collecting for a county service is not repeated.
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