The Board of Health voted in favor of an updated option for customers to pay for the Waste Transfer Station’s services at a meeting last Monday.
Director of Health Andrew Petty proposed a new method to the board, centered around offering credit-card payments as opposed to solely cash and checks.
“We get asked almost on a daily basis ‘Why don’t you take credit cards? When will you start to take credit cards?’” Petty said at the meeting. “We have over 400 commercial accounts, and the bills go out every month, but it would be great for business owners to be able to pay right away using credit cards.”
The technology is provided by Square Merchant Services and Credit Card Processing. Petty went on to explain that this new system will allow residents to pre-pay online before coming to the station, or pay on-site without having to worry about having enough cash or a checkbook in hand. Nonetheless, he assured that cash and check will remain as options. Credit-card transactions will include an additional user fee, but the ease and accessibility is worth it in his opinion.
“I think it’s a convenience piece,” Petty said. “A lot of people do not have cash or checks on them. So it’s just what today is and this is kind of what we need to kind of move to.”
The board voted unanimously in favor of the new feature.
The newest board member, Tom McMahon, placed a large emphasis on improving the transfer station during his campaign before the election, and he explained at the meeting that the new policy is an overdue step in the right direction.
“It’s definitely something that needed to be addressed… When I have gone in the past to weigh and pay it’s always cash or check, and that’s kind of antiquated. We were just a little bit behind the times on that,” McMahon said sarcastically.
McMahon does not view the transfer station as a business, but rather a “utility” that needs to be optimized for Marblehead residents to use. Two other updates McMahon plans to present to his fellow board members include a sorting floor and a license-plate reading technology instead of vehicle-authorization stickers. McMahon explained why he feels his sorting floor idea would provide similar services to the original $7 million edition that was originally proposed during the station’s development, at a cheaper cost.
“What I’m proposing is that you could build a structure in the back where the brush piles are,” McMahon explained. “There’s a lot of room back there to build a three-walled structure, which could be a sorting floor, then we would truck it from there to wherever MassDEP wants that to be recycled… It’s a less expensive sorting floor that gives you the same exact results.”
McMahon feels his long-term plan to implement license-plate scanning technology to recognize Marblehead residents and those authorized to enter the transfer station will contribute to solving multiple smaller problems at once.
“Right now the stickers are tied to both the transfer station and beach access,” McMahon said. “So now if you have the license-plate reader, you can separate the two. You could separate them and lower the cost.”
McMahon noted that this idea originally came from a Marblehead resident.
“I put a lot of my stuff out on social media and I do that for a specific reason,” McMahon said. “Marblehead has a lot of smart people in it, and I’ve gotten a lot of really good suggestions. The license-plate reader came from someone in Marblehead.”