City Enters Revised Agreement With Blue Moose For Trash Services –  Expected to Save City Hundreds of Thousands

It was back in 2022 when the Common Council approved a three-year contract with Blue Moose Sanitation Services for trash and recycling pickup in the City of Cortland. The agreement came after the city removed the blue-bag system and instead implemented a trash collection service. Under that 2022 agreement, waste collection would cost the city $400 per ton of refuse.

Mayor Steve says he has been negotiating with Blue Moose Sanitation. He continued on saying the first year of service had a lot of unknown variables including the city never having a waste collection, finding a company to invest in the equipment to do the job, not knowing what pick-up would be and how trash/recycling pick up. 

After two-years of the waste collection system running well, Mayor Steve says he decided to go back to the negotiating table with Blue Moose from the information and data the city learned and collected over that time period. He looked to get a better rate for the city from the $400 per ton of refuse. He added the City of Cortland still owes $204,000 on the trash bins that are distributed to residences across the city; the city spread out payments for the totes to three years.

Work on a reduced rate for the city began prior to the start of 2025, with invoices from January-March held by Blue Moose until a new negotiated rate was approved. Blue Moose agreed to retroactively adjusting the billing for January-March to the new rate for the City of Cortland. 

The new rate will be a significant decrease with a negotiated rate of $250 per ton of refuse beginning on January 1st, 2025 through December 31st, 2027. Mayor Steve says this new rate will provide significant savings with savings expected to be about half a million dollars per year for 2026 and 2027. Savings for 2025 will be about $296,000 due to the city paying off the remaining balance of the totes. 

A study was also conducted seeing if it was feasible to have the city itself do the waste collection instead of a private company like Blue Moose, but added obstacles were present including a small labor pool, and the cost of electric garbage trucks.

With nothing further, the Common Council voted to approve the new rate for waste collection for the City of Cortland by Blue Moose Sanitation Services.