I have recently learned that Dublin City Council paid way above market pricing for waste collection services in 2012. This raises new questions about the secret deal done between Dublin City Council and Greyhound.  City Councillors must insist that we get a better deal for 2013.

In 2012 Dublin City Council paid Greyhound €2.4million to collect rubbish from the 10,000 City Council flats and senior citizen complexes in Dublin City. This equates to a cost of €240 per flat/unit. This represents very poor value for money for City Council. This price is way out of line with current market pricing in the city where homeowners can get individual collections for less than €100/year.

The Fianna Fail group vigorously opposed the City Manager’s decision to withdraw Dublin City Council from waste collection services. We have requested but been denied access to financial details of the deal that City Management made with Greyhound for domestic waste collections and bad debt collections..

It is unacceptable that there was no public tendering process and the commercial elements of the contract remain hidden from public scrutiny.

It is unbelievable that the City Council could not have got a better price for such a large contract and better value for public money. Flat complexes use shared, large capacity, bins so the cost of collection should be considerably lower than the cost of collection for individual homes.

I have raised this issue and the Fianna Fail group is insisting that Dublin City Council negotiate a better deal with significant cost reductions for 2013.

At tomorrows meeting of Dublin City Council we will be calling for an independent “value for money” review of all waste management contracts entered into by Dublin City Council. Mary