An across-the-board rate-hike and an increase in the minimum fee are just part of latest solution.
But that’s a good place to start.
On March 16, the San Juan County Council unanimously endorsed an “emergency surcharge” under which all categories of tipping fees would be raised by 14 percent and the minimum fee for garbage disposal would go from $8 to $12. (The council took a step back from the $15 minimum fee it favored the week before).
The council also agreed it will wait on input from the Solid Waste Advisory Committee and the Town of Friday Harbor before considering whether to implement those increases at a public hearing, the date of which has yet to be determined. Members of SWAC will meet with the council March 30.
Still, that fee-increase, if approved, could prove short-lived. County officials last week continued to lay the groundwork on a property-tax measure in which voters would be asked to weigh-in on a tax increase targeted specifically for support of the county’s cash-poor solid-waste operation. That 14-percent rate-hike may well be repealed should such a property tax be approved at the ballot box.
For now, however, an across-the-board fee increase is part of a multi-pronged solution intended to help the county establish a more stable source of funding for its beleaguered county solid-waste operation, and to help it finance a series of state-required improvements at the transfer stations on Orcas and San Juan islands as well.
And it’s the solution the council appears to have settled on following a three-month-long tug-of-war over the fate of the solid-waste operation.
“My feeling is that we go forward with this, unless we’re talked out of it,” San Juan Councilman Rich Peterson said.
The Department of Public Works began the year with a shortfall of roughly $563,000 in the “capital” account of its solid-waste division and struggling to cover the cost of its daily operations on the heels of a steep decline in the amount of garbage collected in the past 20 months. Financed almost exclusively by tipping fees, the price paid to dispose of garbage, the operation collected roughly $300,000 less in revenue in 2009 than the year before as roughly 2 million fewer pounds of garbage were disposed of countywide.
Meanwhile, county officials last week began sketching out how proceeds from a $2.2 million bond sale would be used to finance a long list of improvements needed at the Orcas and San Juan solid-waste facilities. That list includes a prospective $1.8 million purchase of a portion the former landfill on Sutton Road, which is owned by the town, and a portion of which is leased by the county for its solid-waste facility on San Juan Island.
That prospective bond sale would need approval by the council at a public hearing. Annual payments are expected to cost about $177,000 over 20 years.
