Auburn apartment buildings have another couple of weeks to comply with the city’s new trash collection rules.

In Lewiston, crews have started enforcing their trash collection rules with $200 fines.

Auburn officially began its new pay-to-collect program Jan. 1, and Assistant Tax Collector Cathy Levesque said the city is being lenient – for the moment. Buildings with four or more units need to pay a fee to the city to get their trash collected, unless the owner lives there.

“Especially since this is the first time around,” Levesque said. “We’re being pretty careful. We’re making sure that if there is a discrepancy, we’re trying to straighten it out before we stop their collections. We’ll get more strict as time goes on.”

Time has gone on in Lewiston, which adopted a nearly identical policy in August. Planning and Code Enforcement Director Gil Arsenault said his staff has issued 12 summonses to apartment owners that left trash curbside without paying the city for collections. Those owners face a $200 fine for their first offense and $400 fine for subsequent offenses.

“But we have been more lenient on certain matters,” Arsenault said. Lewiston’s ordinance allows the city to stop collections permanently if a building owner is slow to pay.

“But we’ve opted not to do that,” Arsenault said. “We understand this is a new system, and we are trying our best to offer good customer service.”

Budget trimming

Both cities began charging for trash collections at large apartment buildings last year as a budget-trimming measure. In Lewiston, the fee is $1.35 per week per unit – $37.80 per month for a seven-unit building. Auburn’s fee is $1.54 per week per unit – $43.12 per month for a seven-unit building.

Auburn apartment owners pay their trash fee two times each year, in December and July. Lewiston owners pay quarterly.

Deputy Lewiston Finance Director Heather Hunter said the city currently collects trash at about 403 apartment buildings, under the new program. Another 21 building owners have decided to collect trash on their own.

The biggest problem has been getting payments on time, Hunter said. The city provides a list of customer addresses to trash collectors. People who signed up for the program but neglect to pay find themselves removed from that list.

“We can’t pick up their trash if they don’t pay,” Hunter said. “We find that people just forget about it. They just put it aside and don’t think about it.”

The next step is a visit from Code Enforcement.

“We tell them they have four hours to remove the trash, and we issue a summons if they don’t,” Arsenault said.

Auburn’s Levesque said about 200 buildings qualify for the city’s program, but not everyone has paid. Levesque said the city is still confirming ownership for some properties.

“In some cases, buildings have been sold,” she said. “In others, the owners had us reroute the bill to agencies that manage the buildings.”

Public Works Director Sid Hazelton said the city has not cut off trash collections to any building that has elected to be part of the program, but that is coming.

“We expect to have some finality pretty soon, and then we’ll know who’s in and who’s out,” Hazelton said.

Levesque said that building owners who don’t join the program but leave trash out to be collected face a $50 fine for the first offense. That increases to $100 for second offense, $200 for third offense and $500 for a fourth offense.

“At that point, if they won’t work with us, we would take them to court,” Levesque said.

[email protected]