Ledyard — Town Council voted unanimously Wednesday night to delay the implementation of a controversial trash ordinance that would have ended municipal trash pickup service from mobile homes.

The vote means that Ordinance 146, which amended the town’s waste management and recycling ordinance and was planned to go into effect in February, will be held off for now. The council also voted to send the ordinance back to the Land Use Committee, which will re-examine it.

The Town Council also will wait to hear the perspective of an attorney, as well as continue to research other potential cost-saving changes that can be made to the town’s trash collection. Most notably, the possibility of switching to a pay-per-throw system, which Town Council Finance Committee Chairman Bill Saums previously said could potentially provide one of the single largest savings for the town’s budget.

“I think the solution that could make all of us happy is pay-per-throw,” Saums said during the meeting Wednesday. “I think if we implement it, we will all save money and solve the problem long term.”

Originally adopted back in October as one in a series of moves to absorb cuts in state aid, the trash ordinance had garnered much opposition from mobile-home owners and park operators who argued it placed an unfair burden on mobile-home residents and excluded mobile-home owners from a service they already were paying for through their property taxes.  

However, some town councilors, as well as the mayor, defended the ordinance at the time, arguing that the situation of mobile-home residents not receiving the service despite paying taxes is similar to other taxpayers who do not directly receive some services their tax dollars go toward. Also, some councilors said that the ordinance was intended to charge commercial businesses — the mobile park operators — for trash pickup, not residents themselves, and is a practice that many other towns employ.

The ordinance was expected to save between $20,000 to $24,000 for the town.

The reason the issue came to a head, though, was because of confusion surrounding a state statute related to who would be responsible for paying for pickup service for mobile parks in the absence of the municipality. The statute specified that park operators would be responsible for “arranging” pickup, but operators argued this did not necessarily mean they were responsible for paying for the service.

After a meeting in December where park operators and residents voiced their concerns and perspective on state statute, council Chairwoman Linda Davis said the town would check with its attorney about interpretation of the statute.

But after nearly a month, the town still hasn’t received clarity regarding the statute, and now with officials voting to send the ordinance back to land use, it’s possible the Town Council may opt to go the route of a different trash collection option altogether.

c.clark@theday.com