Despite an increase in annual trash-collection costs, Arlington’s single-family homeowners will end up paying less over the coming year.
Customers will receive a one-time, $30-per-household rebate, County Manager Mark Schwartz said at the June 13 County Board meeting.
The rebate, to be applied to bills after the start of the county’s fiscal year on July 1, is “to acknowledge the fact that there has been, I’ll just put it this way, suboptimal service received by county residents,” Schwartz said.
A County Board report says the $30 bill adjustment is “based on current residential curbside collection contract savings” of about $1 million.
The county manager did not elaborate, but complaints about trash collection had been accumulating for months.
In summer 2025, the county government awarded Bates Trucking and Trash Removal the contract for waste collection — and soon began receiving negative feedback about missed and delayed trash pickups. This led the county to withhold more than $855,000 from its invoices to Bates between August and January.
On April 20, the county began paying a second waste contractor to $9,920 per week to collect organics. And last month, county officials announced they had awarded the 2026-27 contract to previous contract-holder American Disposal Services.
The switch from Bates to American Disposal is expected to take place in August.
Schwartz’s comments came after Board members voted, as part of their consent agenda, to increase the annual solid-waste cost for residential property owners 5.7%. The increase of $23.52 brings the annual rate to $439.27.
The trash and recycling program is self-sufficient and does not use taxpayer funds. The Household Solid Waste Rate “is a full cost recovery fee and recoups the costs of managing trash, recycling and organics-related services for single-family residential households,” county staff wrote.
“There’s been plenty of efforts to ensure we’re efficiently providing solid-waste collection,” Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said at the meeting.
The county government’s collection program totals about 30,000 customers, including all single-family properties and duplexes, plus some townhouses and non-profit organizations.
