Arkansas Supreme Court bans 'illegal government-backed monopoly' in trash hauling

Holiday Island, Arkansas cannot ban Steven Hendrick and his company X-Dumpsters from renting its "roll-off dumpster service" to customers simply because it already has a weekly trash-hauling contract with another company, a service Hendrick doesn't even offer, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in a victory for economic freedom.

Hendrick sued with help from the Goldwater Institute, which called the city's ban on Hendrick "an illegal government-backed monopoly" expressly forbidden by the state constitution but typical of practices nationwide that stop residents from earning a living as they see fit.

The state's highest court found the Waste Management Act, invoked by Holiday Island to ban Hendrick's service, does not give it license to prohibit competition with its municipal waste provider, so the court didn't rule on the law's constitutionality.

"Nothing in that provision says that where, like here, a municipality opts to contract with a single provider, it can also bar city residents from using other providers to collect solid waste," the court wrote. "Instead, it simply permits municipalities to contract with one or more contractors capable of collecting and disposing of the city’s solid waste."

The Goldwater Institute said courts in the past two decades "have become increasingly concerned about government’s use of licensing laws and other regulations to protect existing businesses against competition, rather than to protect the public against harm," but that many states like Arkansas have anti-monopoly clauses in their constitutions.