You may remember the chorus to folk singer Loudon Wainwright III’s off-the-wall 1973 pop song that began, “You got your dead skunk in the middle of the road.”
If you’ve been driving on Jefferson County-maintained roads this year, you probably haven’t noticed too many of the creatures in your path, though.
The Jefferson County Council voted unanimously June 22 to approve a contract with Wildlife Command Center of Imperial to pick up and dispose of dead animals on the sides of the county’s roads.
“It essentially applies to any county- maintained property, including pavement and the rights-of-way (the sides) along county roadways and county-maintained subdivision streets, and I guess also on parking lots of county buildings,” Public Works Director Jason Jonas said.
However, he said, if a wild animal meets its end in a resident’s yard or on private land, the county has never been responsible for arranging for a proper send-off.
The contract calls for Wildlife Command to be paid per job, up to $8,000 a year, through June 21, 2021. It was the only bidder for the work.
While the county just approved that contract this summer, Jonas said the company has been picking up unfortunate wildlife from roadsides since the first of the year.
“Historically, the county has never been involved in disposing of dead animals on the sides of county roads,” he said. “We would get those calls, and it was unfortunate, but the best we could do was move the carcass into a ditch. We had no way of disposing of them.
“On a state level, MoDOT (the Missouri Department of Transportation) has crews dedicated to picking up dead animals from its roads and has an incinerator to dispose of the remains,” Jonas said. “That kind of operation is not feasible for us. However, in response to the public, we decided to look into how we could provide that service.”
Jonas said the county entered into an agreement with Wildlife Command for the first six months of the year to pick up dead animals on a case-by-case basis.
“We really didn’t have an idea of how to draw up a contract for that service,” Jonas said. “How much should we expect to pay? What kinds of parameters should be spelled out in a contract? That’s why we worked with Wildlife Command for the first part of the year, to see how this might work. Now that we had a half-year of experience, we could draw up a formal contract.”
In documents presented to the county, Wildlife Command said it has nine years of experience removing dead animals from industrial and commercial sites, and has 17 technicians and seven vehicles. It has freezers to store the carcasses until they can be buried by American Eagle Waste Co., Jonas said.
The company charges $64 to pick up an animal the size of a raccoon or smaller during business hours (7 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day) and $148 for larger animals. During off hours, the charge goes up to $128 for small animals and $224 for large ones.
“Most of our calls are for deer,” Jonas said. “We only get a few calls for raccoons or skunks. And in the first six months of the year, we’ve only gotten a few calls during the evening. Usually those are 911 Dispatch calls, and our on-call supervisor will decide whether the remains need to be removed immediately – such as a dead deer in the center of a road that will cause safety concerns – or whether it can wait until the morning.”