The president of the Sarasota, Florida, company that owns Inland Waste says the company is being “thrown under the bus” by Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland over its contract with the city to pick up yard waste and other trash in Cordova.

“Memphis has not paid our April and May bills and we are finishing the month of June this week,” Bobcat North America president Billy Dietrich said in a June 26 email to The Daily News. “I ask you, would you be working while not getting paid for a job???? We continue to do a professional job day in/day out while being thrown under a bus that we had no part of!!!”

Dietrich was responding to remarks Strickland made in late May to the Memphis Rotary Club about complaints of curbside yard waste left for weeks.

“Our system is broken,” Strickland said of the requirement that citizens call the city to pick up the waste and a 21-day period for city crews and Inland, which serves 35,000 customers in Cordova, under a contract with the city.

“I’d be shocked if many people knew that,” Strickland said of the 21-day period. “You certainly don’t know you are supposed to call it in. So the system is certainly not working.”

The city has announced it will put out a “request for qualification” in September in anticipation of the end of Inland’s contract, which ends June 30, 2019. Inland is free to bid for the new contract.

“The Mayor himself doesn’t understand the contract, self admitting in your article that “he didn’t know there was a 21 day cure period for yard waste”!!!!,” Dietrich wrote. “There is also a 7 day cure period for solid waste, so again we are in compliance and always have been.”

City communications chief Ursula Madden differed in the city’s response to Dietrich’s email.

“Inland has repeatedly failed at its job – just go ask anyone in Cordova,” she said in a written statement.

Bobcat bought Inland Waste in May 2016 and Dietrich said that means there is “zero relationship with the previous Inland Company” or problems the cities of Memphis and Germantown had with waste pickup by Inland prior to that.

“That had nothing to do with us and Bobcat North America has had a fantastic service record for the two years we have owned the operation,” Dietrich wrote.

“We have made many upgrades to the facility and have spent millions on equipment upgrades. Again, not sure why the mayor and others don’t understand who we are and what we stand for.”