SHEPHERDSVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Just outside the maintenance facility at Bullitt County Public Schools sits a white garbage truck. Superintendent Jesse Bacon said district leadership thought they could save $100,000 over three years by purchasing their own truck, instead of contracting with Rumpke, to serve its 26 buildings.
"For a district our size, it sort of made sense, the possibility of doing that because of the scope of the sanitations services that we would need," Bacon said, adding that the cost factored in diesel fuel, dump fees, a driver's compensation package and more.
But the project hasn't gone as planned.
"We quickly found out why school districts don't get into the sanitation business when they don't have to," Bacon said in an interview earlier this month. "It was way more complex than we anticipated."
In fact, the project ended up costing BCPS tens of thousands of dollars.
'It never worked'
This plan goes back two years. Bacon said the district's sanitation contract was coming to an end in the spring of 2022, and they got a bid from a company for $300,000 per year for three years, a 250% increase. So he said the BCPS facilities director and chief operations officer at the time advised the district to purchase its own garbage truck and containers to try to save money.
"This was also at a time when we were attempting to cut costs as much as possible to increase staff compensation, as we were having trouble filling positions," Bacon said. "The goal was to break even within two years ..."
Concerned citizens who contacted WDRB but didn't want to be identified claimed the truck "never worked" and regularly broke down.
"Districts say they need to raise taxes to give raises, but if they didn't try experiments with our tax money, maybe they wouldn't need to raise them," one person wrote.
Bacon said they're "great stewards" of taxpayer dollars and maintain the project could work in the end.
"We don't know what the end product is going to be," he said. "There's still a possibility we could break even on this."
According to data obtained in accordance with the state's open records law, BCPS paid $101,620 for the used garbage truck in June 2022, more than $129,000 for dumpsters and recycling bins and more than $8,600 for a carport for the garbage truck. BCPS also added a sanitation engineer job, someone to drive the garbage truck and help the maintenance department.
But three months into using the garbage program in 2022, there was a setback. Bacon said, on a regular run one morning, the front-loading truck was bringing a dumpster up when the hydraulics went out, causing the dumpster to crash into the truck's cab. No one was injured.
"At that point, we knew, A, that it took us a long time to find someone to repair the truck," Bacon said. "B, when we saw the cost of repairs, C, we didn't have a backup truck. When the truck was out of commission, we had to contract a service anyway."
Records show repairs to the garbage truck cost $10,647.92, and that's with submitting a claim with insurance. The district said it doesn't have any pictures of the damaged truck.
Now, the truck will soon be up for auction online.
"There will be a reserve in place that we hope to get to," Bacon said. "If the reserve is met at the auction, we'll release the truck and we'll be back to square zero. If it's not, we'll do an absolute auction, just like we'd do any other surplus item that the district auctions off."
The person hired for the sanitation engineer job still works for the district, but now works on maintenance since they're not driving a garbage truck anymore.
On a positive note, Bacon said buying the dumpsters actually helps save money.
"By just us purchasing and owning the dumpsters from those leftover funds, we've already decreased our monthly and yearly sanitation costs by about $70,000," he said.
And the two employees who researched the idea to start the garbage program no longer work for the district. Bacon said he encourages his employees to think of creative ideas to try and further the district and save money.
"If it had all worked out, we'd be sitting at even money," he said. "Every year, it would have saved the district $300,000 a year that we could have planned on and would have contributed to increased staff salaries to try and get our folks competitively paid next to the private sector.
"Hindsight is always 20/20. If I had known that the malfunction could have happened so easily, repairs would be so costly, sure, we wouldn't have done it."
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