Dayco Lawsuit Against Walton County

Dayco, based out of Freeport, has provided garbage collection services to north Walton residents since 1986. Walton County has questioned the billing and says Dayco has overbilled the county around $600,000. Previously reports told you of the county’s investigation and claims against Dayco, the county asking the sheriff to look into the matter, a letter from Leroy “Bud” Day addressing the overbilling and more recently the decision of the Freeport Council to follow the county in temporarily or permanently ending the contract with Dayco. The Freeport City Attorney said the county is ending the contract with Dayco August 15 and will use another garbage collector.

While Bud Day sent a letter saying his company would work with the county on the reported billing issue, he later retracted the letter and Dayco has filed a lawsuit against Walton. Court documents show the complaint is for a breach of contract for anticipatory repudiation of contract for declaratory judgement; for judgement of estoppel; and injunctive relief. Basically Dayco is asking the court to get involved in deciding if the contract can be ended. The garbage collector says loosing the contract with Walton will harm the company and if Walton contracts with someone else and the court sides with Dayco, then Walton could have two garbage collection contracts.

Using the additional sales tax, Walton provides garbage collection for its residents. The money does not cover all the garbage fees for non-residential. Dayco has a franchise for the unincorporated parts of Walton County and for the City of Freeport. Dayco says it has maintained a master customer service list and the company says the franchise agreement did not contain any provisions which defined a residence for billing purposes. The master customer list was created through a number of sources including county records. They also say there is no general methodology to be used in determining the number of residences for Dayco’s monthly billing. Dayco was allowed to bill directly for business garbage collection. Dayco says they relied on county databases and data sources.

In the complaint, Dayco says, in fifteen years, the county made no objections to the master customer list. On January 10, 2010, Walton Finance Director Bill Imfeld contacted Bud Day and said they had conducted an audit for billing from March 2006 to January 2010. This is when the overbilling was cited. The complaint says Dayco was given 30 days to correct the billing errors Imfeld said were grounded in inaccuracies in the master customer list. Dayco claims the audit was not an audit to determine the number of residences or households in north Walton, rather and audit to determine the physical addresses on Dayco’s master customer list coincided with GIS and E911 addresses derived from county databases.

Bud Day says he attempted to physically count all houses serviced by Dayco. The complaint also states Imfeld created a spreadsheet showing 11,703 households and compared what the complaint calls a preliminary number to the number of households invoiced to the County by Dayco for each of the previous 48 months. The complaint says this comparison is what Imfeld used to cite the overbilling for $587,387.14. The court complaint further says Imfeld and the County knew the allegation and claim was false because Imfeld and the County knew the incomplete number of households identified by Bud Day (11,703) was not representative of the number of households in the Dayco north Walton service area. The complaint says the County knew the allegation and claim of overbilling was false because the utilization of one specified stagnant number of households could not be an accurate representation of the number of households in north Walton for each month over a forty-eight month period.