EDITORIAL: Gauging garbage costs: Individualized rates have pros and cons

Posted 10/6/16

But if they fill up their dumpster to the brim and you leave yours mostly empty, it doesn’t matter — the cost is the same.

Every Powell household pays $31 a month on their trash bill, whether they have one bag of trash a month or a dozen. A …

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EDITORIAL: Gauging garbage costs: Individualized rates have pros and cons

Posted

If a neighbor leaves on every light in their home and regularly waters their lawn with city water, their utility bill likely is quite a bit higher than yours.

But if they fill up their dumpster to the brim and you leave yours mostly empty, it doesn’t matter — the cost is the same.

Every Powell household pays $31 a month on their trash bill, whether they have one bag of trash a month or a dozen. A local resident, Les Hunt, recently asked the Powell City Council to consider changing its garbage rate structure and charge by weight or the number of times trash is picked up.

We agree it would be a more equitable way to charge for garbage. However, we also understand the city’s concerns with adopting a new plan.

If the city started charging by the weight of dumpsters, every city garbage truck would have to be outfitted with thousands of dollars of worth of new equipment to weigh the trash bins. Those are costs that would likely just be passed along to residents and translate into higher rates — especially since the city doesn’t have extra money amid a tighter budget.

If the city tried basing rates off of the number of times a household’s trash is collected, tracking that information would add time to drivers’ routes.

More significantly, hundreds of Powell households don’t use roll-out garbage containers. Instead, they share a large dumpster in the alley with their neighbors. With three or more households using one dumpster, it would be impossible to calculate whose garbage is whose.

However, with all of that said, the city still should consider whether garbage rates could be reduced for single-resident households. It doesn’t seem fair that a senior citizen living alone and using the trash service only once or twice a month pays the same fee as a large family that fills a dumpster eight times each month.

Perhaps an option could be to create an individualized rate structure based on the number of residents in a household. For example, a single resident living alone could get a discounted rate of $25 per month. Of course, that rate structure would depend on residents telling the truth. It would be easy for someone to fail to report roommates or their number of children to get a cheaper garbage bill.

We’re also concerned that, under the current rate structure, there’s no incentive for residents to recycle. Too often, dumpsters are filled with cardboard, aluminum cans, paper and other recyclable materials.

Everyone pays the same blanket trash fee and $2 recycling charge, whether you carefully sort your trash or simply throw out everything.

A possible incentive toward recycling could be to offer a voucher. For example, if a resident takes items to the recycling center regularly, they could earn a discount on their garbage bill. We realize that would also require more work — someone at the center to tally residents’ recycling visits and a city employee to apply the discounts on utility bills. But we would like to see some sort of recycling incentive. For some people, environmental considerations always will make it worthwhile to recycle, but others need another incentive to go green.

The city has understandable and logical reasons for maintaining its current garbage/recycling rate structure. However, if there’s a way for residents to save money while also keeping recyclables from landing in the landfill, it would be worth exploring.

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