The city of Selma has less than five months to figure out what it is going to do about garbage service.

Advanced Disposal opted not to renew its contract earlier this year due to a large amount of unpaid bills that is costing the company money.

“We have until the last of December to do something, so it won’t go into effect until January,” said Selma Mayor George Evans. “The goal is to try to have someone set up and ready to go by no later than November.”

According to Evans, the city is preparing to seek bids from garbage collection companies.

“Attorney Jimmy Nunn is doing the RFPs (Requests for Proposals),” Evans said. “That is basically where we are, getting the RFPs ready to send out to companies that are interesting in bidding and making proposals for the garbage service.”

Evans said the RFPs will be sent out as soon as they are approved by the city council, which could be as early as Tuesday’s council meeting or the following meeting.

“We’ll send them out, and [companies] have certain amount of days to get them back to us,” Evans said. “We’ll start sitting down with the council to determine who we’re going to select based on the best offer they give us for collecting garbage. It may be the same company, or it may be somebody else. We don’t know yet.”

Evans said even though Advanced Disposal opted not to renew its current contract, they are one of the potential companies.

“They’re in the loop. They’re interested in being a part of whatever we do,” Evans said.

Mary O’Brien, chief marketing officer for Advanced Disposal, said the company is interested in bidding depending on the city’s RFP.

“We’ll definitely look at the RFP when it is issued, and at that point, based on the language in the RFP, make a determination how and what level we’ll participate,” O’Brien said.

Advanced Disposal’s current contract with the city is for subscription-based service, which makes it responsible for collecting fees from individual customers.

O’Brien said Advanced Disposal will consider bidding for that kind of service, but there are also other options, like universal service.

“We’re really going to be looking at the service level and how payment is to be received by Advanced Disposal, whether the city has to pay or if we will be responsible for billing the individual residents, such as the current program is right now,” O’Brien said.

“And we’re worried about the bad debt. It is certainly something we’re experiencing presently. We don’t see that changing significantly if the bid specs don’t change, so we would have to take that into consideration.”

The city cannot tie garbage fees in with water fees, but universal service would allow them to assess garbage fees through property tax or other means.

“We’re talking about a lot of different options right now. “We don’t know where it is going to fall because that is what one of the [options] is going to be,” Evans said. “We’re going to talk about all of that in terms of how we can get more funding through retail or property taxes or whatever for the purpose of meeting the needs of our city.”

No matter what the option or company, the city is racing the clock and must have the issue resolved before the contract runs out at the end of December.

“We’re going to have to have it worked out by then,” Evans said.

“That is why we’re getting those [RFPs] ready now in August, so they can be ready to deal with and hopefully have it completed by no later than November.”