Taxpayers to foot $1.75-million recycling bill in 2017

THUNDER BAY -- The 2017 municipal budget will include a $1.75-million bill to support the city's entire recycling program and more waste costs could follow.

City Council voted to accept its administration’s recommendation to move diversion revenues from the user-supported column to the tax-supported column on Monday.

Where curbside garbage collection has always been funded through taxation, the recycling program been supported through tipping fees at the John Street Road landfill site for the past two decades.

As recycling has increased, garbage volumes have fallen, resulting in year-over-year increases in tipping fees between seven and 10 per cent to fund the recycling program. 

Moving recycling costs to the tax base will bring increasing tipping fees under control but it won’t stop those fees from rising. The current model advocates increasing tipping fees by three per cent increase annually.

Administration also included in the resolution that it would review waste costs and announced it intends to return to council the following year to ask it to consider implementing tipping fees for curbside pickup as well.

Although the recycling service is only available to residential property classes, transferring the program’s cost to the tax base would mean industrial, commercial and institutional classes would also be paying for it.

City solid waste and recycling services manager Jason Sherband said he can foresee expanding recycling services to businesses and institutions but such a move would significantly increase the project’s scope.

“If the taxes are spread out over all sectors, we now have the opportunity where we can have that conversation,” Sherband said.

“That’s more material being processed. We’d have to have some conversations with our current service provider in terms of if we can manage that within the funding envelope we have with them or if there are increased costs associated with that. We can certainly come back to council at that time with those options.”

Coun. Joe Virdiramo cast the lone dissenting vote in council’s near-unanimous decision to accept the plan.

“It may not be in the current term but we’re going to have a garbage tax to alleviate the running of the landfill site, then in 2018, we’re going to have a conversation about a tipping fee at the curb, which means paying for the garbage you’re putting on the truck,” Virdiramo said. 

“So we’re going to have the garbage tax, then we’re going to have so much for the bag tax, then we’re even looking at the stormwater management plan that may be another tax – the so-called, someone said, ‘rain tax.’ That’s very interesting.

“What are we going to give up to pay for all this?”

The issue is expected to appear before council again on July 18 for ratification.