Residents of this manufactured housing community will get to see Brevard County’s planned new automated trash-collection system in action next week, as a truck’s mechanical claw lifts 64- and 96-gallon wheeled carts from the curbside, dumps out the contents and sets the carts back down.

But some are already criticizing the plan as garbage.

“A lot of the people here only put out one little bag of garbage a week,” Pat Clark, incoming vice president of the Barefoot Bay Homeowners’ association, said Thursday. “Why should they put that in a big bin and drag it down the (driveway)? And if they (filled it) for two weeks, just think of the ants, bugs and maggots.”

The system requires the wheeled garbage bins, said George Geletko, spokesman for the contractor, Waste Management Inc. And he said the company will provide the bins free of charge, without passing the costs to the consumer.

Waste Management is negotiating a new contract for 100,000 homes in unincorporated areas of Brevard, such as Barefoot Bay and Micco.

And the contract’s proposed rate increase, from $9.17 to $11.65 a month, has angered residents, Clark said.

But Geletko said that increase only looks bad because the existing county contract, which expires in October 2008, didn’t account for skyrocketing fuel prices.

Waste Management also serves northern Indian River County, where county Utilities Director Erik Olson said going to automation would be costly and only worth it if the county required residents to subscribe to garbage collection. Brevard does, but in Indian River it’s still voluntary.

Traditionally, workers hop off the truck, pick up curbside cans, dump them into the rear of the garbage truck and hop back on for the next house. This month, the County Commission endorsed automation, asking Waste Management to report back at a Jan. 31 final public hearing with budget estimates based on including and excluding recycling as an automated service.

“Currently Waste Management has a hard time keeping people, so the level of service is way down,” County Commissioner Helen Volts said Thursday. “Nobody wants to work on the back of those trucks, especially in the summer time.”

She said the new system also will expand the kinds of material the county can recycle, boosting an annual recycling revenue of $150,000 to $400,000.

As for the homeowner, she said, the new bins are better balanced and easier to maneuver than having to carry traditional 30-gallon cans.

Clark said she needed to see that in practice. So on Saturday, Clark and her neighbors on Barefoot Bay’s Egret Circle will get the new wheeled carts so they can fill them and see the truck at work Wednesday.

Geletko said Waste Management has already set up pilot programs for about 20,000 customers, before the county inks the final deal, in Cape Canaveral, Satellite Beach, Indialantic, Indian Harbor Beach and Melbourne Beach.