The city of Selma is looking for ways to get people to pay their garbage bill, and one suggestion, which is combining bills for garbage and water, is already out of the picture.

It is common practice for a city to combine the two into one bill, but Mayor George Evans said Tuesday that it is not possible for Selma because Selma Water Works is a separate entity.

“The water bill is not an option, and the thing about that is, if we owned the utilities, we could do that, but we don’t own the utilities,” Evans said.

“The Selma Water Board is an independent operation. Some cities do own their water board, and they can do that, but we do not.”

With that option out of the way, Evans isn’t really sure what the city can do at this point.

“Right now we are just still trying to come up with ideas and getting in touch with [Advanced Disposal] to see what they’re going to propose and any other company that may submit something,” Evans said.

Advanced Disposal notified the city several months ago that they opted to not renew its contract when it ends in January, according to Mary O’Brien, chief marketing officer for the waste collection company.

O’Brien said nearly half of Advanced Disposal’s Selma customers are not paying their bill, and the company cannot continue servicing the city without getting paid.

Evans said garbage bills used to be sent out with water bills in the past, but they were not dependent on one another.

“The water company did in fact send it out as an attachment to the water bill. People paid their water bill and their garbage bill at the same time,” Evans said. “However, even with that, they didn’t do it religiously because the water company could not turn [customers] water off because they did not pay their garbage fee.”

Evans said even though the bills were sent out together, some people still chose not to pay for garbage fees.

“Even with that program down there, it ran into the hole of people not paying their garbage because they couldn’t cut their water off because they didn’t pay their garbage fee,” Evans said.

Evans said at one time he contemplated publishing delinquent customer’s names.

“I talked about at one point putting people’s names that didn’t pay their water bill in the paper like they do for taxes and things like that, but we were advised that it wouldn’t be a good choice to make,” Evans said.

O’Brien said Advanced Disposal would be willing to bid again to service Selma depending on changes in the contract.

“We would be happy to bid again when the new proposal comes out, but we can’t renew it under the existing pricing structure and contractual language as it is written today,” O’Brien said last week.