Northwood News ♦ February 2022

Compost Crew Might Give Our Area a Reduced Rate

By Jacquie Bokow

Compost Crew has been servicing our neighborhood since 2018. I contacted CC on 15 December to see whether our neighborhood qualified for a discount. I was told, “the five-gallon bin is $20/month and the 12-gallon bin is $24/month.” I was already paying $25 for a five-gallon bin.

I told Sarah Cedro, a Residential Composting Analyst at Compost Crew, that their boundaries didn’t match our neighborhood. I asked her how many more homes are needed for the price break.

She responded that she couldn’t change the boundaries “since there are already discounted rates applied.” (The area they designated “Kemp Mill” included part of our neighborhood and they had the discount.) “However,” she continued, “if you could get six more sign ups within the boundaries, I will decrease the rates to $16/month for the five-gallon and $20/month for the 12-gallon.”

The area of our neighborhood that Compost Crew designates as one service territory includes all of Woodmoor and most of NFCCA’s territory except for the part shown within the dotted line. Some homes within that portion get a reduced rate since they’re considered part of Kemp Mill’s territory. When I tried to get them to redraw their border to include all of our neighborhood so we could get a group discount, the plan backfired.

On 17 December, I sent her a map of NFCCA’s territory as well as a list of the streets in our neighborhood. By this time, six more households had mentioned on the listserv that they had signed up, so we should have reached the criteria they set for the discount.

A month later, on 19 January, she finally responded, telling me that, once she updated the boundaries to the ones I gave her for the NFCCA, “that service area will decrease significantly from 65 to 29 active members.” Instead of just adding our missing territory, she had cut Woodmoor out of the service area! She also said, “I’m still waiting to hear back from my team about how many people we will need to be able to decrease the rates.”

Aghast, I told her, “I don’t expect you to remove the Woodmoor neighborhood from the territory you include in our rates!” I just wanted her to tell me how many more we need to get the discount and how we get it.

After another email requesting a response, on 21 January she wrote, “I updated the boundaries so it is just North Four Corners, because we cannot have two neighborhoods with one community program” (although they did before and it seems she does have the power to change it). Then she wrote, “Since the boundaries have changed, I cannot decrease the rate to $16/month quite yet but if more people sign up then I absolutely can. I’m sorry if there was any confusion, I hope this clears things up.”

They’ve increased their price to $32/month (five-gallon). And she still didn’t say how many more we need to sign up to get the discount! ■