Charlottesville Public Works wants city employees and trucks to provide curbside trash service beginning in spring 2028

The five members of Charlottesville City Council have already been briefed on a plan for city government to invest $2 million in equipment and personnel to take over the work of curbside trash pickup.

Now the public has a chance to review a plan that would see the city’s Public Works Department purchasing five trucks this January and fully taking over from a private contractor by the spring of 2028.

“When the City moved away from directly providing curbside collection approximately two decades ago, contracting allowed the City to avoid a significant investment in collection equipment, employees and fleet support,” wrote Public Works Director Steven Hicks in a staff report for a Council work session scheduled for October 5.

“Today, the market has changed, and staff believes direct City operation is now the more financially and operationally practical option,” Hicks continued.

Resources:

• Staff report for the October 5, 2026 discussion
• Presentation for the October 5, 2026 discussion

Council has already been briefed on the matter in legal but secret briefings referred to as “two by two meetings” because two Councilors together does not consist of a quorum. Charlottesville City Councilor Michael Payne confirmed the meetings took place in an email after telling fellow members of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission about the idea at their meeting on September 3.

“We essentially have one monopoly operator for us, which is continually escalating costs,” Payne said at that meeting. “And so our preliminary analysis is that if we bring that service in-house, where our city workers are collecting the trash and recycling, and we purchase our own trucks, we’ll actually save money within five years.”

The details of that analysis are not within the public materials for the October 5 meeting but the staff report does go into some detail about what would happen.

The current contract with GFL is for $1.3 million a year. The term expires on June 30, 2028.

In 2025, the city hired the firm NewGen Strategies to conduct a review of the program that found the city spends $2.7 million on solid waste but only brought in about $1.1 million in revenue that year. Staff and the consultant presented a proposal to replace the existing system of decals and stickers in favor of new city-issue trash containers that would be rented by the month.

Council declined to proceed as I reported at the time.

Now Council will be asked if they support a plan to spend about $2 million over the next two years to make trash pick-up a local government service that would continue to use the decal and sticker system.

“The proposed in-house operation would include five collection trucks, with four used for daily routes and one held in reserve,” the staff report continues. “The operation would require eight CDL-qualified driver/operators and one Equipment Technician.”

Hicks claims that the annual costs would be $730,000 a year, an amount lower than the contract with GFL. The eight drivers are budgeted at $550,000 with $65,000 for the equipment technician. Each driver would be budgeted at

The staff report does not factor in the incremental personnel increases that would come each year under collective bargaining.

Another $17,000 would go to purchase routing software with $25,000 budgeted for fleet maintenance and $90,000 for fuel.

The city would purchase the five trucks in January 2027 for $1.3 million and it would take some time for them to arrive.

Another claim is that city employees would be more vigilant about enforcing the sticker and decal system with an initial estimate of $100,000 in increased revenue. A fifteen percent rate increase is also proposed.

The three questions to be asked of Council are worth printing. How would you answer? If you’re a candidate for City Council in the 2027 election, how would you vote?

1. Whether to continue developing the transition from contracted curbside collection to an in- house City-operated collection program, with City-operated collection beginning in April 2028?

2. Whether to proceed with the approximately $1.3 million FY27 purchase of five collection trucks in January 2027 in order to maintain the proposed implementation schedule?

3. Whether a solid waste sticker and decal rate adjustment should be incorporated into the FY28 budget process, with the approximately 15% scenario presented in this memo serving as a planning example?

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Paid subscribers cover the cost of conducting research for this article which was originally published in the October 2, 2026 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement.  You can either subscribe through Substack or make a charitable contribution.