The Carting Business: Who Plays, Who Pays?

Despite the fact that licensing standards for carters were adopted by East Hampton Town five months ago, not one license has been issued to date and, even worse, a good number of the carters who are doing business here have not yet even submitted applications.

Figuring out who they are is the problem.

What had been until three or four years ago a modest trade involving a handful of small firms run by local residents is morphing into a complex, highly competitive industry, faster than the would-be regulators, the customers, and even the carters themselves can keep up with.

During the evolution, some of the local firms fell on tough times. The owner of the two largest and longest-established, Timothy Volk, has been in bankruptcy twice in the last three years. His companies, Volk's Montauk Disposal and Stanley Residential, have been in business here for a half-century.

Age Of Specialists

Mr. Volk and the other locals have struggled to retrofit their trucks and their management styles to better serve the growing demand for recycling and to comply with town recycling laws, but they are still losing customers to the newcomers.

"You have to change with the times, don't you?" said Mickey Valcich, who started Mickey's Carting 10 years ago. Within a short time, he had to buy compartmentalized trucks for his residential route and more Dumpsters for his commercial customers.

The East End market is increasingly dominated by specialists.

At one end are the one-man recyclers who pick up separated newspaper, cardboard, tin cans, and the like, mostly from residences, and dump it at the town recycling and composting plants. At the other are the out-of-town fleets that charge less than the locals and haul mostly commercial trash to privately owned recycling plants, transfer stations, and incinerators UpIsland, or to out-of-state landfills.

Staying Small

Joe Cucci and David Collins, the owners of Dump On Us and Three R's Carting, run one-man recycling companies specializing in source-separated trash, mostly residential but with a few small businesses. Each has as many customers as he can handle and takes on new ones only when they fit into the route easily and agree to recycle religiously.

"I insist on it," said Mr. Collins.

Both men said they attracted customers by offering lower prices, which was possible because of the town's discounted fee for dumping recyclables, $15 a ton as compared to $65 for nonrecyclables.

Staying small, they said, affords them the luxury of being selective.

"I'm not greedy. I'm not going to take a customer in Montauk and go all the way out there just to say I have a new customer," said Mr. Collins.

Low Prices: A Problem

At the same time, this year's severely depressed prices for recyclables have presented a problem for officials. The Republican-controlled Town Boards in East Hampton and Southampton are trying to make up for the loss of revenue by moving away from intensive recycling to dispose of trash with as little fuss and cost as possible.

That shift could further polarize the industry and give the specialists an even greater advantage over the firms like Mr. Volk's and Mr. Valcich's, which are trying to satisfy both ends of the market simultaneously.

"I still see a future out there for the mom-and-pop hauler, but mom and pop will have to be more aggressive in soliciting customers and will have to buy more efficient equipment, which most of them can't afford to do," said Anthony Noto, a spokesman for S.S.C., the Holtsville carter that was the first out-of-town outfit to win a piece of the East End's commercial action and is so far the most successful.

Licenses

"The world is changing," said Mr. Noto, a former Babylon Town Supervisor. "The towns are getting more sophisticated, the carters are getting more sophisticated, and the customers are getting more sophisticated."

Since East Hampton adopted its licensing law in June, 17 firms have filed applications. But at least a dozen others have not, though they are known to do business here or advertise that they do.

The law says any carter doing business in East Hampton must have a license, the grade of the license depending on the type of service and truck size. To qualify for one, a carter must show financial stability, a good reputation, and a solid customer base.

Residential Market

Get With the Program is probably the newest one-man operation in town. Its owner, Joe Fisher of Springs, drives a truck for a lumber company during the day. Joseph Daniels, who owns Great Eastern Carting with James DiSpirito, is another new player; he pumps gas at night to make ends meet.

Both companies, which have applied for licenses, are focusing on residential customers.

"It's an open market," said Mr. Fisher. "There's guys get upset when they see my truck - 'Oh, just what we need, more competition' - but I think that's great. Now they know my name. That's free enterprise. That's the American dream, right?"

The "little guys," as he called them, "are friendly. We help each other out. There's people who aren't like that. It can get pretty cutthroat out there sometimes."

No Names

David Paolelli, as head of the Town Sanitation Department, has the job of reviewing the license applications. He said the identification problem was the reason the town adopted the license law in the first place: "We wanted an assurance that whoever is here is reputable and safe."

Some of the carters who have not applied, he said, "are the guys doing it with a pickup truck, as a second job." Others, said Mr. Paolelli, are "no names" who drive unmarked trucks and "bootleggers" who, because they haul garbage out of town, are unfamiliar to town officials and may not know about the new licensing requirement.

Mr. Paolelli said he was frustrated by the town's inability so far to put a name to all the concerns.

"We're still in a holding pattern," agreed Councilman Len Bernard. He said officials have learned, for example, that out-of-town construction companies with work in East Hampton will bring in their own carter to the job site, "so we have no idea who they are or where they're from."

Subcontractors

Councilman Peter Hammerle, who shares supervision of the recycling program with Mr. Bernard, said officials and some local carters have been making note of the names painted on Dumpsters and trucks seen around town. The locals pushed for the law, asserting it would shed light on disreputable firms.

But sending license applications to the names and addresses noted on the rolling stock has only caused further confusion.

In some cases, a firm whose name is on a Dumpster has subcontracted the job of emptying its contents to a second firm, and neither has been willing to apply for a license, said Mr. Hammerle.

"Sorting this all out, no pun intended, will take a while," he said.

UpIsland Players

Son Mar Carting, a Middle Island firm that has been drumming up commercial business here for about four years, is one concern that has not yet applied. Ken Filippo, a vice president, confirmed that upIsland haulers can make the long trip between East Hampton and an UpIsland transfer station pay off by combining forces.

"The locals felt they had the market all to themselves, and they were being unreasonable with their prices," he said. "We knew we could do it cheaper, and we do our homework better than the locals for outlets," such as privately owned transfer stations for construction debris.

Two years ago, recalled Mr. Noto of S.S.C., locals demanded help from Southampton and East Hampton Towns in competing against upIslanders. One said the seasonal economy here forced him to try to make a year's income in six months.

"Well, we don't have to do that," said Mr. Noto. "We're charging the same in East Hampton as we are in western Suffolk. We had to buy more trucks to make it work, but we just solicited more customers."

Demolition Market

Son Mar, like other big upIsland firms, concentrates almost exclusively on the construction and demolition market. It has 25 trucks that run all over Long Island. S.S.C. has 33, some of which pick up from the 22,000 homes in its contract with Smithtown, but it has no residential accounts in East Hampton, Southampton, or Riverhead, said Mr. Noto.

"The East Hampton license prohibits it," he said, noting a carter must show it has 200 residential accounts or an average of $2,000 a month in residential receivables to qualify for that type of license.

Still, there are other specialized carters who see opportunities to branch out.

Far-Off Transfer

Christine and Tom Kaeding of Water Mill own Mr. and Mrs. Clean, which has two trucks that handle only construction and demolition cleanups, for about 30 contractors. Mr. Kaeding, who started the company while he was in the military, said he was tired of driving to a private transfer station in Islip, which has a lower tipping fee than one in Riverhead, and would like to build his own transfer station in East Hampton.

However, town officials have been complaining for two years about the mountain of construction and demolition debris in the back of Mr. Volk's yard on Springs-Fireplace Road, the subject of a separate story in this issue, and have shown little enthusiasm for Mr. Kaeding's plan as a result, he said.

While Mr. Collins, one of the first one-truck recyclers in town, has no intention of branching out, Mr. Cucci sees a bigger market for himself.

Resist Change

He started out three years ago taking only recyclables and only from houses. Customers complained, though, of having to hire a second carter to take away their nonrecyclables, and Mr. Cucci started taking that trash to the town dump too. He is now looking at the commercial market, and a new packer truck as well.

"The old-timers, they were afraid to change," he said.

Mr. Collins sees it differently. "It can be very difficult to change overnight," he said.

Like many others, Mr. Collins protested a recent proposal that East Hampton save money by shutting down its recycling plant on Wednesday. The idea has apparently died.

"I have customers to service on Wednesday. Going into my sixth year, that would have been very difficult to pull off," he said.

Long-Term Contracts

There have been rumors that the large carters are interested in buying up the small local firms. Mr. Noto, however, said that wouldn't make good financial sense, at least for S.S.C.

"You could buy a customer from another company for $500, but why not just offer that customer the $500 instead?" he said.

The practice of offering long-term contracts to customers, for up to five years, with a period of free service tacked on up front is "common up west," he said, although it has engendered considerable hostility from Mr. Volk and other locals.

"Yeah, I've lost customers, but you just do the best you can. You try to take care of the customers you have. Anyway, it's still business as usual: I'm still in the business of picking up garbage," said Mr. Valcich.