By John Barrella

Privatizing garbage collection can save money — or quietly cost more. In a town still waiting for its financial fog to lift, and a DPW that hasn’t answered basic questions, the honest answer is: not yet.

Every few years, when a Massachusetts town stares down a budget gap, someone floats the same idea: let a private company haul the trash. It sounds like a clean win. No aging fleet to replace, no crews to staff, no landfill headaches — just a contract, a monthly invoice, and one fewer thing for the town to run. For a community like Middleborough, still working its way out of a genuine fiscal hole, the pitch lands with particular force.

But the tidy logic of privatization tends to fray on contact with the details. And the details are exactly what a town in Middleborough’s position cannot yet see clearly.

Start with the case for it, because it’s real. The private waste industry argues, with some evidence, that contractors bring economies of scale a single town can’t match — better access to capital for new trucks, route software that squeezes efficiency out of every mile, and the ability to spread costs across dozens of municipalities. A frequently cited body of older research found government-run garbage collection running substantially more expensive than private contract collection.

There are recent local success stories, too: Lockport, New York, reported roughly $380,000 in savings the year after it privatized, and Fresno, California, cut residential rates 17 percent when it handed collection to a private hauler. When it works, privatization lets a town stop worrying about the mechanics of garbage and redirect scarce attention to schools, public safety, and roads.

Here’s the problem: it doesn’t always work, and the failures are quieter than the wins.

Consider Brookline — not some distant cautionary tale, but a Massachusetts town that made this exact move in 2025. Facing a chronic shortage of trash workers, Brookline handed curbside collection to Casella, a large regional hauler. The town was candid about the tradeoff. Its own estimate put the first-year cost of the privatized arrangement at roughly $60,000 more than keeping the work in-house. Brookline privatized not to save money but because it genuinely could not keep the driver’s seats filled. That’s an honest reason. But it demolishes the assumption that private always means cheaper.

The deeper risk isn’t the first-year price. It’s the second contract, and the fifth. Public works directors who’ve lived through this describe a familiar trap: a vendor wins the initial contract at an attractive rate, the town sells off its trucks and lets its crews go, and then — when renewal comes and the town no longer has any way to bring the service back in-house — the price climbs.

Bloomington, Illinois, backed away from privatization after its own public works director warned that once a town sheds its equipment, it has surrendered its leverage. You cannot credibly threaten to walk away from a negotiation when you’ve sold the only trucks that would let you.

And the savings a town does see are often less than advertised, because some costs simply migrate rather than disappear. When collection goes private, residents frequently pick up a new monthly fee, a bin-purchase charge, sometimes a sign-up cost — expenses that were previously folded invisibly into their tax bill. The town’s budget line shrinks; the household’s out-of-pocket cost may not.

There’s also the matter of who answers the phone when a street gets skipped. Chris Knight, Stillwater, Oklahoma’s waste management director put it bluntly, the complaint calls still come to town hall — but the town no longer controls the truck. You keep the accountability and give away the control.

Now layer Middleborough’s specific situation on top of all that.

Our town just lived through a bruising budget year. Officials identified a shortfall of roughly $3.3 million, delayed the Annual Town Meeting because the numbers were widely incorrect, and ultimately brought forward a revised fiscal 2027 budget of about $109 million built on real job cuts across departments.

The school district warned of its own multimillion-dollar gap. Voter turnout in the spring election jumped as residents registered their alarm, and several incumbents lost their seats. And let’s not forget about a looming forensic audit.

The town is now working through a town manager search and leaning on interim leadership. By any fair reading, Middleborough’s financial picture is still developing, not settled. That is precisely the wrong moment to sign a long-term contract that’s hard to reverse.

I raised flags about the DPW two years ago. I’m still waiting for answers.

I’m not writing this as a detached observer. I sit on the Finance Committee, and I have been asking hard questions about how the DPW is managed since 2024 — well before privatization entered the conversation.

The math wasn’t complicated. Sesame Street math, as some folks around here might say. Running the basic numbers, I found the DPW was turning over roughly 18 percent of its workforce year after year, and had been for four straight years. Pair that with overtime costs running far higher than they should, and you have the textbook profile of a department that isn’t being managed well — churning through people and paying a premium to cover the gaps they leave behind.

And here is what I want to be clear about, because it matters: I did not raise this as an indictment of any one person. I raised it the way a Finance Committee is supposed to — we see a problem, and we’d like to see it fixed. That’s the whole job. It was not an accusation; it was an invitation to solve something before it got worse.

It was received as an attack. Concerns I brought in 2024 about turnover and overtime were treated not as a shared problem to be solved but as a challenge to the director’s management of the DPW — and were, to my knowledge, waved off rather than acted upon, by DPW Director Chris Peck and by my fellow Finance Committee member Alan Kirschner, who was the committee’s DPW liaison at the time. When a straightforward request to fix a measurable problem gets read as a personal affront, that itself tells you something about how the department was being run.

Then there is the money I still cannot account for.

In reviewing the numbers, I identified more than $1 million in “turn-backs” — appropriated dollars returned at year’s end — and I formally asked for an audit trail showing where those funds originated and where they went. To this day, I have not received it in the way that would document an actual audit trail. Let me be precise about what I am and am not saying: I am not alleging that anyone stole anything.

I am saying that more than a million taxpayer dollars moved through this department’s books without the accounting I requested being produced. What I did receive was partially hand-written, and incomplete at best. In a town that just cut real positions and cut departments to close a $3.3 million gap, an unexplained seven-figure sum is not a footnote. It is a flashing red light.

And we haven’t even gotten to the water and wastewater accounts — the enterprise funds that are supposed to pay for themselves out of the rates residents already hand over every quarter. Those are running deficits too. I know, because I said so in public meetings, on the record, before this budget crisis ever reached the front page. I am still waiting on those answers, same as all the others.

Which brings me to the oldest question in the accountability playbook — the one Senator Howard Baker made famous during Watergate: what did they know, and when did they know it?

Strip away the local particulars and that is precisely what Middleborough taxpayers are owed. A town does not stumble into this many unexplained shortfalls by accident. Somebody knew. The only real questions are when they knew it, and why the rest of us are learning about it only now.

And I am not asking anyone to take my word for it. Don’t believe me?

The town’s own records will back me up. The requests I made, the concerns I raised in 2024, the accounting I asked for and never received — it’s all in the system, in writing. Pull the emails. Look at the Public Records Requests (PRR’s). The same PRR’s I had to take out because we could not obtain the information through the regular channels. The paper trail is the point: I did my job and asked the questions on the record, and the answers never came back.

And here is where it stops being about one department. Jay McGrail was the Town Manager at the time — the chief executive of this town, the administrative head of every department, the person ultimately responsible when a problem is flagged and nothing happens. He was squarely aware of what I had raised. He was on the email chain. These concerns did not vanish into a bureaucracy; they landed on the desk of the one official with the authority to act on them.

So what did he do with them? Not fix the turnover. Not produce the accounting I asked for. What the record does show is that the town found the money to put Peck behind the wheel of a new leather seat clad Chevy Tahoe — a well-documented purchase of close to $60,000, before you count the take-home perks and gas, repairs, and insurance the town also covers — a vehicle he has now been driving for months. For new followers, this is a new revelation.

For those who’ve been part of the herd for a while, this “semi-luxury” SUV is old news — because, yes, I’d already reported on it. I’m not surfacing it now to break a story; I’m surfacing it because it belongs in the pattern. And there is more I won’t state as fact: there are unconfirmed reports about how this vehicle — and perhaps others — were actually acquired. I’m not going to get ahead of what can be proven.

Those questions belong with the people who hold real authority to answer them, and we’re going to wait and see how they sort it out. But waiting to see is not the same as letting it go. The questions should be placed on the record and answered, on the record.

Let that timeline sink in.

For over a year, there was money and attention for that Tahoe, while the management problems and the unexplained seven-figure accounting I raised first went nowhere.

McGrail, for his part, is no longer here to answer. He took an early exit — departing in March 2026, just before the full scope of the budget shortfall became public. I’ll simply lay the sequence out and let residents make of it what they will: the questions were raised, they went unanswered, the Tahoe was bought, and the manager was gone before the reckoning arrived.

Are we starting to see a pattern? I’ll let residents — and the record — answer that.

Here is the point, and I want it to be unmistakable: the DPW should not be handed any major new arrangement — privatization included — until these questions are answered. You do not restructure a department whose books you cannot fully reconcile and whose management problems you have never fixed. Doing so doesn’t solve the dysfunction; it launders it into a contract and hands the bill to residents for years. Fix the accountability first. Everything else is building on sand.

The responsible sequence

None of this means privatization is wrong for Middleborough.

It might, on close inspection, turn out to be the right call — the way it was, for its own honest reasons, the right call for Brookline. The point is narrower and more disciplined: a town cannot properly evaluate a decision this consequential until it can see its full financial position, account for how its DPW has actually spent public money, and study what comparable communities experienced — including the ones where the second contract cost far more than the first.

The sequence should be straightforward. First, resolve the budget, install permanent leadership, and get real answers on the DPW’s turnover, overtime, and that outstanding seven-figure accounting.

Then commission a genuine apples-to-apples analysis — one that counts not just the truck payments and salaries the town would shed, but the new household fees, the contract-administration burden, the renewal risk, and the cost of ever bringing the service back.

A credible analysis invites the town’s own DPW to submit a proposal alongside the private bidders, the way Stillwater, Oklahoma, did before deciding to keep its collection public. Competition sharpens everyone — including the in-house team, which might just find the discipline it has been missing.

Trash pickup is one of the few services residents notice every single week. It is worth getting right, and worth getting right deliberately. Middleborough should keep the option on the table — and keep it there until the town can see clearly enough, and account honestly enough, to choose well.

John Barrella is a former chair and current member of the Middleborough Finance Committee as well as the Town Manager Search Committee. This is an opinion column; the views are his own.