With a year remaining on its five-year deal to provide residential waste hauling services for the village of North Riverside, the Roy Strom Company just got a long-term extension courtesy of the village board on Oct. 17.

The village board voted unanimously to extend Roy Strom’s contract for 10 years, with the new deal going into effect Sept. 1, 2017, the date the old deal is slated to expire.

The deal will also freeze the monthly per-household cost the village now pays to the company for three years at $20.76. The cost will increase 3 percent annually from 2020 to 2023 and then 3.5 percent annually from 2024 to 2026.

By the end of the contract the cost for waste hauling to the village will be $25.91 per single-family household per month.

The $20.76 per month cost per single-family household that will be in place through 2019 is still far cheaper than the $22.87 per household the village’s former waste hauler, Allied Waste, charged North Riverside during the final year of its decades-long relationship with the village, which ended in 2012.

Roy Strom’s per-household rate charged to the village won’t top Allied Waste’s final rate until 2023.

The switch to Roy Strom, which saved the village more than $200,000 over simply renewing Allied Waste during the past four years, was not a slam dunk back in 2012. 

The proposal to put the waste hauling contract out for competitive bidding was made by then-Trustee Rocco DeSantis and supported by Trustee H. Bob Demopoulos, who served on the board committee handling such matters.

When the time came for the full village board to decide to seek competitive bids, there were actually two votes against doing so.

Roy Strom’s 2012 bid turned out to be 20 percent lower than what Allied Waste had been charging the village, giving DeSantis and Demopoulos a big political victory over the VIP Party board majority.

In less than a year, however, DeSantis would be off the board, resigning after a failed bid for the mayor’s office. Demopoulos was re-elected to a second term as trustee in 2015.

But the village board, still dominated by VIP, has embraced Roy Strom, which also upgraded collection of household recyclables, as its waste hauler.

In terms of how the contract extension will impact homeowners, the $23-per-month fee that homeowners see reflected on their water bills will not change for at least the first three years of the new contract and perhaps longer.

Waste hauling charges billed directly to residential customers in North Riverside have stayed at $23 per month since the final year of the Allied Waste contract in 2012. 

With Roy Strom freezing the rate it presently charges the village through 2019, homeowners won’t see their rates going up any time soon, said North Riverside Finance Director Sue Scarpiniti.

“Residents won’t see an increase for at least the first three years of the contract or longer,” Scarpiniti said.