A dispute between Botetourt County and a private trash company will go to trial after a circuit court judge denied this week the county's request to dismiss the case.

Advanced Transportation and Logistics, a solid waste and recycling hauler with offices in Botetourt County, claimed in a lawsuit filed in June that the county's board of supervisors violated the Virginia Public Procurement Act when it voted in March to extend by three and a half years its contracts with five other private haulers.

Advanced Transportation said the county should have opened a new bidding process. It also argued that the extensions contain an array of new requirements with which the haulers must comply and therefore constitute new contracts.

Advanced Transportation wants the extensions nullified so it can bid for the work under the old contract provisions, which would have opened bidding in the summer of 2009.

In a ruling dated Monday, Circuit Court Judge Malfourd "Bo" Trumbo agreed with the company's argument that the new provisions of the contracts were a "significant modification" of the original agreements. He rejected the county's argument that the procurement act doesn't apply to haulers under the county's solid waste ordinance.

In the 12-page ruling, Trumbo said the extended contracts constituted sole-source procurement, but that the county failed to advertise the contracts as such and therefore violated the procurement act.

The supervisors said they approved the contract extensions to help the haulers recoup added expenses they expect to incur because they now have to take the county's residential and commercial trash an extra distance to Salem's solid waste transfer station.

The haulers had been taking the trash to Botetourt County's landfill off Catawba Road near its border with Craig County. The switch to Salem was made after county officials learned last year that the county landfill was approaching capacity and would need to be closed this year.