$4 fee slated for bins at curb
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on September 28, 2015 1:46 PM
City residents who leave their trash and recycling bins out for longer than 24 hours after trash has been collected will pay a $4 fee -- if their neighbors complain.
Enforcing the fee will not be actively pursued by the Public Works Department, but will be implemented on a complaint-driven basis. This means if a resident calls the Public Works Department and complains about a neighbor leaving their bins out too long, sanitation employees will go out and push the bin back from the curb and charge the offender $4.
"We've never established a fee because we weren't actively pursuing it," Public Works director Jose Martinez said. "We got our first complaint that made it to Public Works last week, so we decided we needed to make this resolution."
The City Council approved the fee at its last meeting.
An ordinance to implement a pushback fee was included in an update to the city's code of ordinances in February, and the council waited to establish the amount of the fee until after other ordinances surrounding automated garbage truck trash pickup took effect this month.
During the council's work session, the city also considered implementing a fee between $4 and $20 for "call backs," where sanitation employees must go back out and pick up garbage that was not collected the first time they came to collect it.
"If we do miss somebody and it was their fault, such as they had overflow or the bin wasn't out, and they're not able to take it to the dump, we're thinking about instituting the service where we come back the next day. If your service day is on Friday, we'll come back on Monday," Martinez said. "The purpose is to serve those who are not able to take missed trash to the landfill, not able being the key words. This is going to be something where people have to come back and do double the work, because they would be visiting areas for the second time that week."
The City Council felt that $20 was too high of a price to pay for call back service, and that $4 was too low.
Martinez said any fee implemented by the city for garbage call back service should act as a deterrent, and not priced to where it would be reasonable for citizens to use every week.
"This is not a fine, it's a service," Martinez said. "We would be offering this service versus the citizen taking it to the dump themselves."
Council members also expressed the sentiment that, if the fee is implemented by the city, the first offense for a call back should be free.
"I think you could set it up where we do it once a year for free, because all of us miss it once in a while, but you're going to have people that regularly are missing it and calling us back," said City Manager Scott Stevens. "I think if that's the case, they ought to pay for that truck to go back because there's a real expense to the rest of our customers."
The council did not vote on whether to implement a fee for call back service, but asked Martinez to return to a council meeting in the future with a more clearly defined recommendation for the fee structure of call back service.
But the council did vote to not allow residents to use their own garbage containers for city garbage collection purposes. Martinez said allowing the use of private garbage cans puts the city at risk of damaging personal property, and could possibly encourage the theft of bins.