LEWISTON – A Casella subsidiary will be the city’s broker for selling its collected and sorted recycling, according to the city’s Finance Committee.

The group voted 3-1 Monday night to accept a bid from FCR Goodman, a division of Casella based in Scarborough. The company will broker the city’s recycling on the commodities market for two years, under the contract.

But the decision came over the protest of city Councilor Betty Dube and Dan Gregoire, a member of the city’s solid waste committee.

Dube said she objects to doing more business with Casella.

“I know people who make their living acting as watchdogs, keeping an eye on what Casella is doing,” Dube said. “I know of cities in Maine that devote a portion of their annual budget to legal fees to help fight Casella. Why would we want that company more involved in our community?”

Pine Tree Waste, another Casella subsidiary, currently collects all city trash and recycling. Dube said she hasn’t trusted the company since councilors turned back a plan in 2007 to hire the company to manage Lewiston’s landfill.

Last summer, city officials learned that FCR Goodman planned to use space at the Lewiston landfill as a way store up to 10 tons of unsorted recycling collected outside of Lewiston. Officials rejected the company’s plan as soon as they learned about it.

But City Councilor Denis Theriault, a member of the finance committee, blasted back, calling that an unfair bias against the company.

“This is a witch hunt by some members of this city against Casella,” Theriault said.

Councilor Robert Reed, also a member of the committee, agreed.

“This is because a few people in this community just want to run Casella out of town,” Reed said. “I’m tired of it.”

According to city staff, the city ended a two-year contract with FCR Goodman in August. The city delayed signing a new contract then because the commodities market for recyclables was down at the time.

It hasn’t rebounded, and now the city is running out of room to store recyclables while waiting for a buyer.

“The fact is that without this contract, I don’t know what we’ll do for space,” Solid Waste Superintendent Rob Stalford said.

The city requested bids from four recycling companies to act as brokers for the recycled paper, plastics and metal collected curbside. The city received two bids, from Corcoran Environmental Services of Kennebunk and FCR Goodman.

According to the bids, the Casella-subsidiary offered the best bid price on reselling recycled mixed paper. Corcoran had the best bid on recycled newspaper and milk jug plastic. The bids for both companies were the same for recycled cardboard and paperboard.

Purchasing and Budget Director Norm Beauparlant said the other two bids didn’t fit with the city’s format. Eco-Maine’s bid called for single-stream, unsorted recycling. That’s a service the city is not ready to offer yet. A bid from Maine Resource Recovery Association didn’t include strict prices, but offered option pricing based on the commodities market.

“We rated both of those as being nonresponsive to our bids,” Beauparlant said. “They didn’t give us anything we could compare.”