Tag Archives: garbage

City of Peoria

Would “pay as you throw” make Peoria dirtier?

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We have grave reservations about charging Peorians a fee for garbage pick-up, and we think City Council members should, too.

Non-payment will be a problem. Littering will increase. So will illegal dumping: on county roads, in commercial Dumpsters, even on city streets and parking lots. Garbage very possibly will accumulate, indoors, out of sight of inspectors…. Peoria will be a dirtier city if garbage isn’t picked up at every home, every week. It will be a dirtier city if streets and gullies become dumping grounds for people who quit paying their trash collector.

While these dire warnings may sound like they just came out of today’s paper, they didn’t. They were published in the Journal Star on June 24, 2003. The reason? Peoria was considering implementing a $6 per month garbage fee.

I wonder if anyone had the foresight to quantify how much illegal dumping there was before the fee went into effect so we can compare it to how much there is now. That might give us an accurate picture of how much there will be if Peoria goes to some sort of “pay as your throw” system next year. While there have been reports of illegal dumping since the garbage fee went into effect (one even appeared on this blog), it doesn’t appear to be the widespread plague of filth we were warned would happen.

I can’t help but think that maybe — just maybe — concerns about “pay as your throw” causing Peoria to degenerate into some kind of Lord of the Flies scenario might be similarly overstated. Nevertheless, I understand the drawbacks — specifically, the “pay” part of the proposal.

But the truth is that you’re going to pay no matter what. It’s not a matter of paying or not paying; it’s just a matter of how you’ll pay. If it’s not “pay as your throw,” how shall we pay for it? Raise property taxes? Sales taxes? The garbage fee? Pick your poison. Costs are going to go up even if we didn’t change a thing. Adding recycling is going to raise costs more. Property taxes would be a progressive way to pay for it; raising the garbage fee would be regressive. Putting the extra fee on the user would hit large families pretty hard, and in that sense could also be seen as regressive. Raising the sales tax… well… we have to save that for necessities like museums, civic centers, and hotels….

There are no easy answers, only more questions. But I doubt “pay as you throw,” if ultimately adopted, would turn Peoria residences into mini-landfills. Whatever the reason is for rejecting “pay as your throw,” it shouldn’t be that.

City Council, City of Peoria

Recycling should be incentivized

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Recycle SymbolRight now in Peoria, there is an incentive to throw everything into the landfill and recycle nothing. You all know why. We pay for garbage collection through our property taxes. Then we pay again through the $6 monthly “garbage fee” (actually a regressive tax) on our water bills. Then, if you want to recycle, you pay yet another bill directly to Waste Management of a little over three dollars a month. When confronted with a choice between throwing away paper and plastic in the regular garbage for which they’ve already paid twice, or paying a third fee to recycle, most people (reportedly 91% of Peoria households) not surprisingly choose the former.

That needs to change.

Recycling is the ecologically responsible thing to do. Plastic, copper and metal recycling are some of the activities that can be done by everybody that can help not only our community but the world as a whole. And with single-stream recycling (where you can throw all your recyclables into the same bin), it couldn’t be any easier. The experts say that 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, and I believe it. Since we’ve started recycling, my family of five only has one can of regular garbage a week. Everything else gets recycled.

In light of that, some sort of modified “pay to throw” system would be reasonable and relatively easy to implement. The idea I’ve heard that has the most promise is this: Unlimited recycling pickup every other week; one can of regular garbage pickup every week; and a fee (per bag or per can, perhaps) for any additional regular garbage. This would incentivize recycling without being punitive. After all, we’ll always have regular garbage; not everything is recyclable. It’s only fair to provide some level of regular garbage hauling without an additional fee.

There are some who are worried about illegal dumping. I think there’s a way around that, too. Instead of requiring residents to buy stickers for additional bags of refuse and refusing to pick up non-stickered bags (the system used in some other communities, like Morton), waste haulers would still pick up any/all garbage left at the curb or alley side. Any applicable additional fees owed by the household would be included on that household’s next water bill. This makes it convenient for everyone. If the current $6 garbage fee hasn’t led to illegal dumping, using the water bill to collect additional fees won’t either — especially if the council decides to adopt Councilman Turner’s suggestion of rolling the current $6 garbage fee into the property tax bill.

The council will be discussing the garbage contract at its regular meeting tonight (July 28) at 6:15.


City Council, City of Peoria, Waste Management

Talking trash

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The city’s solid waste removal contract with waste removal solutions for households expires at the end of this year. This contract has been in place since about 1992. Now, if you’re just an average person, you might think that the city had plenty of time to start the process of rebidding this contract. After all, they knew when it was due to expire, and they know how long it takes to negotiate contracts such as these, so logically they should have been able to work backwards from the deadline to determine a time line for the rebidding process.

But they didn’t do that. No, here it is June 2009, six months before the end of the contract, and they’re just starting the year-long process. Naturally, they are requesting an extension to the existing contract that has been in place for 17 years already to allow them extra time to negotiate a new contract. That request was on last week’s (June 23) agenda, but was deferred for a month.

Meanwhile, they managed to engage a consultant to get some advice on rebidding the contract. I don’t know exactly how city departments are allowed to spend their budget, but it seems to me that every other consultant that has been hired by the city had to be approved by the council; this consultant contract never came before the council. However, it must be no big deal because the council didn’t seem to care.

The consultant made a bunch of recommendations on how the city can lower the cost of waste removal. Of course, all those suggestions mean worse service for residents. For instance, they’re recommending that everyone be provided a 90-gallon tote, and that all other garbage containers be outlawed. You wouldn’t be able to buy your own tote, of course — you’d have to essentially rent it from the disposal company. And they want to do away with alley collection of garbage, even though that’s one of the reasons alleys exist, and many older neighborhoods were designed for garbage collection from the alleys, not from the curb.

To their credit, the city council has so far been pretty adamant about keeping the alley collection of garbage, but city staff is trying to convince them to change their minds. They want to big the contract with all-curbside pickup as an option so the council can see how must more expensive it is to include alley collection. There’s only one reason for splitting out these costs: to try to persuade change. One wonders why it’s more expensive to run a truck down an alley rather than a parallel street 130 feet away. Waste Management says their trucks are too big for our alleys (solution: use smaller trucks). City staff says the heavy trucks damage the alley surfaces (question: wouldn’t moving the trucks to the streets just move the damage to the streets as well? Or is this an admission that alleys are poorly maintained in the city?).

The consultant is also suggesting that the city limit or do away with picking up anything that doesn’t fit inside one of the recommended 90-gallon totes. So, whereas now you can throw away that old couch or cabinet (what they call “bulky waste”) — the consultant says that should stop, be reduced to just once or twice a year, or charged an extra fee, such as $10 or $15 per item.

The biggest issue, however, is going to be how to include universal recycling. There is a lot of popular support for alleyside/curbside recycling as part of the base contract. Currently, anyone who wants to recycle has to pay extra and are billed directly by the hauler. That means that a household like mine that recycles pays three times for garbage service: once on our property taxes, once on our water bill, and once directly to Waste Management. Most households are not willing to pay three times for garbage hauling, so they just throw all their recyclables away in the regular trash. In other words, our current system incentivizes people not to recycle. That needs to be changed.

However, that will cost more money. So the question becomes how to pay for such service. One idea is to do the opposite of what we’re doing now: make recycling pickup free, but charge a fee for regular garbage. The way they do this in Morton is by selling trash stickers. However, in a more urban area, there is concern that this might lead to more illegal dumping or other unsanitary conditions as some people attempt to avoid the fee. So another idea is to make all collections every-other week. Regular garbage would be picked up on odd weeks, and recycling would be picked up on even weeks, for instance.

One other change that has been recommended in order to save money is switching to a sticker system for yard waste. Right now, unlimited yard waste disposal is included in the base contract. The cost of that service could be offset or possibly covered completely by charging residents a fee per bag of yard waste. On the other hand, this would be yet another reduction in services city residents already enjoy and for which they already pay twice.

Who would have thought garbage could be so complicated?