The city expects to begin sending trash to a private hauler for shipping to a Mainland landfill by the end of the month.

Manny Lanuevo, city deputy director for environmental services, told the City Council's Executive Matters and Legal Affairs Committee this week that the target date is Sept. 28.

In keeping with a settlement agreement reached lasy week between the city and Hawaiian Waste Systems, the city has awarded a contract to the Washington-based company and will soon issue it a notice to proceed, Lanuevo said.

Under the contract, the city agrees to pay Hawaiian Waste to ship a minimum of 100,000 tons of solid waste annually at $99.84 a ton.

The waste will be delivered by the city to a trash compaction facility at Campbell Industrial Park. After the waste is baled and wrapped, it will be loaded onto a barge at Kalaeloa Harbor and shipped to the Mainland, said Jim Hodge, Hawaiian Waste chief executive.

The city has long been discussing alternatives to putting trash into the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill. But the Hannemann administration has stressed repeatedly that shipping to the Mainland is only an interim measure until the city completes the third boiler at the H-Power waste-to-energy electricity plant either late next year or in 2011.

Hodge declined to give a specific date for the start of operations, but said he expects to be accepting municipal waste by the end of the month and shipping it to the Mainland for disposal sometime in October.

"It will take us about a month to get together that first bargeload of waste," Hodge said.

Simcoe Environmental Services, another Washington-based trash hauler which finished second in the bidding, this week sent a letter to city Budget Director Rix Mauer III restating its concerns about the city's contract with Hawaiian Waste.

Simcoe Environmental's earlier bid protest against Hawaiian Waste's bid was rejected.

Simcoe Environmental president David Ross said that while he wishes Hawaiian Waste and the city well, he's skeptical the company will be able to meet its low-bid deal with the city.

"I'm just concerned that it has a lot of problems," Ross said, noting that he did not think Hawaiian Waste factored in such things as the bad economy and rising fuel prices in its bid.

The Simcoe bid was $184.47 a ton, nearly double that of Hawaiian Waste's.

Hodge, however, said there's been no change in how much he is charging the city for his service.

"Our price was $99.84 a ton ... it was exactly the price that we bid a year ago and that's the price today," Hodge said.