ALTAMONT — Turnabout appears to be fair play in Altamont as internationally-owned but locally-operated Robert Wright Disposal is offering a year of free pick-up just months after a number of village customers saw their waste-and-recycling services unexpectedly change hands. 

Customers of Pollard Disposal Services, with a Main Street office in the same building as the recently-shuttered Home Front Café, were notified in a Dec. 31 letter that Twin Bridges Waste & Recycling (or Advantage Disposal) would be their new hauler starting Jan. 1

Wright offers service in Bethlehem, Guilderland, and Coeymans — the company also has contracts with the town of New Scotland and village of Voorheesville to pick up residential waste.

A call to Wright was not returned before this story was posted.

Service is now being offered from south of Route 20 to the New Scotland line, from east of Leesome Lane and Bozenkill Road (but only east of the intersection of Bozenkill and Bell roads), and extending west as far as the Northeast Industrial Park in Guilderland. 

For a monetary comparison, depending on the chosen billing cycle, Pollard customers paid between $24 and $27.50 per month for service.  

In August of last year after Wright was bought by the third-largest waste services company in North America, Twin Bridges worked to take advantage of residents’ aggravation over having to sign a two-year agreement by offering residents a year of free service and no contracts. The fine print in the Twin Bridges contract  said customers would still be partially indebted to the company if they wanted out of the deal.

Saratoga-based County Waste (also owned by the same parent company as Wright) and Wright countered by filing suit against Twin Bridges in November. 

The suit alleged, among other things, that Twin Bridges exhibited a “pattern and practice” of making false statements in an attempt to win over customers; offered “improper inducements” so that County Waste customers would break their contract; and that Twin Bridges, in emails and fliers, made defamatory statements about County Waste, according to the court filing.

In December of last year, Twin Bridges filed a counterclaim against the local companies while also naming their Canadian owner, Waste Connections, as a third-party defendant. 

Twin Bridges claimed the multi-national Waste Connections and its wholly-owned subsidiaries “collectively engaged in anticompetitive and tortious conduct in an attempt to monopolize the Waste Services market in the Capital Region to the exclusion of Twin Bridges.”

Waste Connections and its subsidiaries have since asked the judge in the case to dismiss Twin Bridges’ counterclaims and third-party claims.

Scott Earl, owner of Twin Bridges, was also the original owner of County Waste, which he started in 1990 and owned until 2011, when he sold it to Waste Connections for $299 million.