PECOS, Texas — Stinky, fly-infested trash.
"Our town is so frustrated," Nancy Burkholder, Pecos resident said.
"It's a valid complaint. Unfortunately we've gotten behind," Seth Sorensen, Pecos city manager said.
Citizens in Pecos say they feel like the city is letting them down, one dumpster at a time.
"Me and a lot of other people feel that our community has been horribly mismanaged," Burkholder said.
"We've watched our town get dirty and run down and things like no trash service," Burkholder said.
So why does the city have this problem?
A few reasons.
"One is that we've had difficulty keeping up our trash trucks, which are now going on 7 years old, keeping them up and running as well as the snow of a few weeks ago put us behind. We did not feel comfortable putting our very large trucks into those very skinny alleys with the ice and mud, and so that put us behind almost an entire week," Sorensen said.
Now it's been 3 weeks with very limited trash pickup.
Nancy says it's never been this bad or widespread.
"We've had difficulty keeping even one or two up and going all at the same time," Sorensen said.
The city has 4 trucks that have been in use since 2004. They're now starting to fall apart.
The good news is the city's 3 new trucks were delivered 2 weeks ago.
The problem?
None of the new trucks are running their routes just yet.
They start clearing out garbage bins tomorrow.
Another issue is that the new trucks only dump new garbage bins, meaning new trucks will not dump the old garbage bins.
"It's a bad situation, we're very aware of it and we're not trying to be deaf to the issue," Sorensen said.
So why not completely scrap the old garbage system to make room for the new one?
"The ability to change out the entire system all at once is cost prohibitive for one, another is the ability to transition them all at once. We simply don't have the man power," Sorensen said.
Now not only are residents frustrated, they're having to pay for a service they're not getting.
The city manager tells me it costs residents about $23 a month and that they aren't doing anything right now to compensate.
As for the solution, the city said they've placed rollout trucks at 4 locations for excess trash. These locations are E. 5th street and peach street, Lamar elementary, Stafford and Moore street and Iowa street across from the softball field.
They are also recruiting 6-8 city employees to manually pick up excess trash starting tomorrow using 2 city trash trailers.