Superior’s mayor and City Council reached a compromise on implementing a new fee for garbage service.
Under the agreement reached and approved Tuesday night, residents will pay $7.75 per month for the next three years starting Jan. 1 for garbage collection and landfilling the waste. In 2019, that fee climbs to the originally proposed $9.75 per month.
The caveat is residents will pay an additional $5 per month for each can beyond the first.
The compromise proposal was presented by Mayor Bruce Hagen and accepted by a majority of councilors - Jack Sweeney, Denise McDonald, Graham Garfield, Bob Finsland, Mike Herrick, Dennis Dalbec and Tom Fennessey.
Councilors Esther Dalbec, Dan Olson, and Warren Bender opposed the measure.
ADVERTISEMENT
Garfield proposed amending an ordinance he introduced that would have eased residents into the new fee by charging $7.75 per month in 2016, $8.75 in 2017 and $9.75 in 2018 and beyond; his proposal had included a measure for a reduced fee for the city’s lowest income residents.
Hagen proposed the compromise after a presentation by Waste Management, the only company to submit a proposal for collection services. Even Waste Management was offering lower rates Tuesday, down from $11.25 per can per month to $10.65 per can per month for the size can the city uses now by eliminating a $5,000 franchise fee. The cost for additional cans for Waste Management is about 60 percent of the cost for the first can.
Hagen said the goal of the $5 fee for each additional can is purely educational - to encourage residents to recycle and reduce the number of cans they use.
Residents already pay for recycling but only about 70 percent of city residents recycle. Reducing the tonnage of garbage tipped at the landfill would reduce the $1.7 million the city pays to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in tipping fees. The DNR charges $13 per ton in tipping fees.
“We wouldn’t even be talking about this if it weren’t for that,” Hagen said Tuesday night about the tipping fee collected by the state.
The Superior landfill enterprise fund was facing a $1.1 million deficit in 2016 with no capacity in the city’s general fund budget to subsidize the landfill without causing drastic cuts in core services - police, fire and public works.
Under the compromise adopted by the Council on Tuesday night, the city would have a modest reserve of about $2.1 million in 2023, Hagen said.
