The city is refunding to QuikTrip the money the company spent for thousands of green-waste stickers that it intended to sell to Tulsa’s curbside trash customers, Solid Waste Manager Roy Teeters said Tuesday.
The convenience store chain was the sole distributor of the 50-cent stickers residents were required to place on bags of extra yard waste and bought at least 125,000 from the city — $62,500 worth — to sell at wholesale prices.
When the city’s trash board suspended the sticker requirement after the revelation last month that yard waste was being incinerated along with regular trash, QuikTrip asked the city to take back its unsold stickers, Teeters said.
“It’s just like if the bread man delivered too much bread to the grocery store,” he said. “We’re in the process of getting them back from them.”
Teeters said late Tuesday that he could not immediately look up the amount of the refund, and QuikTrip spokesman Mike Thornbrugh said he didn’t know how many stickers were left over.
The company bought them as a service to the city “with the understanding that if there’s an excessive amount (left over) ... they would be refunded,” Thornbrugh said.
Although the trash board has decided for now not to offer refunds to customers, Thornbrugh said QuikTrip will refund unused stickers brought to its stores under its policy to refund any returned item — no receipt necessary.
That practice drew ire from the trash board Tuesday.
The board, formally known as the Tulsa Authority for the Recovery of Energy, has asked residents to keep their green-waste stickers because they might eventually be allowed to stand in for the orange “extra refuse” stickers that are required for bags of garbage that cannot fit in trash carts.
“It’s my understanding that there’s no reason at this point in time for QuikTrip to engage unilaterally on a refund program for green-waste stickers,” trash board Chairman Randy Sullivan said, although he added that “QuikTrip can do whatever they want to.”
The question of refunds “is premature at this time,” he said.
Thornbrugh said “very few” customers have asked to be refunded for stickers but that the company has obliged them, as it would “for any commodity that we sell.”
The Tulsa World reported last month that yard waste picked up at residents’ curbs has been taken to the city’s trash incinerator almost since the beginning of the new trash program Oct. 1 because equipment at its mulching plant could not remove the plastic bags in which residents are asked to place the material.
The city, meanwhile, had continued requiring residents to use the green-waste stickers and still includes a 70-cent monthly fee in every trash customer’s bill.
The trash board has since begun debating ways to reform or eliminate the program, which the city’s Legal Department has said could nullify the trash board’s contract with independent hauler NewSolutions.
The board seeks a second opinion and last month voted to allow Sullivan and Vice Chairman Paul White to search for and employ a private legal firm.
Sullivan said Tuesday that they will hire Stephen Schuller of the Gable Gotwals law firm, a previous trash board member who has represented the board before, for $7,500 — within the amount allowed without competitive bidding.
