The Carroll County Solid Waste District is contracting with a private company to haul residential waste, Berryville Mayor Tim McKinney said Friday, Aug. 11, but customers shouldn’t notice any change in their service.

McKinney also serves as chairman of the solid waste district’s board of directors.

“We were given 30 days notice that we could no longer take our trash to the Tontitown Landfill, because of the issues they’re having with capacity over there,” McKinney said. “They told us if we wanted to use a Waste Management landfill, we’d have to go over to Russellville which is not a good haul with big load of trash over the mountains like that. The transportation part of our business has always been the most troublesome, and disposal. We were at the mercy of landfills, and there’s a lot of federal regulations with over-the-road type stuff. So we made the decision to solicit bids to take care of our trash and haul it from our compactor station to a landfill.”

CARDS Recycling was the winning bidder, McKinney said.

“It’s actually going to save us a little money,” he said. “What we want to do is focus on our core business, which is providing trash and recycling services to as many people in Carroll County as we can. We’ve got franchising agreements with Berryville, Green Forest, Eureka Springs, Holiday Island and Alpena where we serve the whole town and we serve probably 60 to 70 percent of the whole county outside that. So we want to concentrate on that and do a better job of providing service.”

McKinney said the move is something the solid waste district did “to improve our business.”

“We just couldn’t be at the mercy of landfills anymore,” he said.

CARDS has agreements in place with landfills in Northwest Arkansas, southwest Missouri and southeast Kansas, McKinney said.

“With the volumes they have, they can negotiate it a lot better for us,” he said.

McKinney said he wanted to dispel rumors about the changes.

“The rumor got out that we sold out and everything,” he said.