SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Area communities had to move quickly Friday when Feher Rubbish Removal suddenly stopped picking up trash.
Towns had a clue something was up when they received letters from the state Department of Labor last month telling them to stop paying Feher. “The Department of Labor told us to withhold payment,” says Town of Salina Supervisor Mark Nicotra.
That letter was followed by one from Feher’s creditors that informed towns they were to be paid first.
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While he had previously received similar letters from the Department of Labor regarding Feher, Nicotra said he had not seen a letter like that from the trash hauler’s creditors before.
“I began to make some calls,” Nicotra says. He made arrangements with another hauler, Superior Waste Removal, to collect trash in his town, if Feher could not perform.
On Thursday, Feher picked up some trash in Salina, but left other areas uncollected.
On Friday, Superior Waste Removal had begun picking up in the town, Nicotra says.
Outside Feher’s headquarters building on State Fair Boulevard in Syracuse, workers told how they did not learn the company had shut down until after they arrived for work before sunrise Friday.
Crews usually roll out to their routes about 5:30 a.m., says Andrew Spence, of Syracuse, but on Friday morning workers were told to stick around. At 6:30 a.m. they say there was a meeting at which they were told the company was shutting down because “the bank had seized everything.”
Workers’ accounts of the meeting differ on details, but all said they were told the company owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency (OCRRA) — where trash is brought.
OCRRA spokesperson Kristen Lawton confirmed that Feher had not yet paid its bill for April, but said the company was given until the end of the day Friday to make its payment. If the payment is not made, she says OCRRA will turn away Feher trucks starting Monday. “Otherwise it would compromise the system for everyone else,” she says.
Lawton says OCRRA offers a significant per-ton discount on trash tipping fees to haulers who pay by the end of the month. When Feher did not pay the April bill before May 1, OCRRA’s Executive Director Dereth Glance and Attorney William Bulsiewicz reached out to municipal officials to let them know they might want to make other arrangements,” Lawton says.
“We want to make sure our communities get their trash collected.”
Along with Salina, Feher served the Town of Cicero, Town and Village of Fabius, Town of LaFayette, Town of Pompey, Village of Solvay, and the Town and Village of Tully.
For individuals who contract with Feher and may be looking for a new service, OCRRA added a feature to its website’s homepage this morning, a link to a list of trash haulers with phone numbers and addresses. Feher is not on the list.
Contact McChesney at cmcchesney@cnybj.com
