2011-04-27 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Because the problem with collection is you’ve got to have the facilities at the transfer station to collect the money. The problem that we have at the scales at the landfill is, we weigh it, and then we send you a bill. We don’t have a mechanism for guys to come in with a charge card and pay before they get to dump. And that’s for the commercial stuff. So I’ve always said that we need to get to the point where you pay. You want to dump here, you need a line of credit or you have to be prepared to pay cash or something like that. Because otherwise you’re always chasing them after the fact. Guys go belly up, you can’t find the money. On pay as you throw, the argument has been guys will dump. So, I had said why can’t you have a specific item, whether, I’m not sure what the issue would be, where it’s assessed on the real property tax bill, so that every TMK on the island has to pay $25. You come up with your number in terms of what you think, what you need in order to pay for your residential population. What you’ve got right now is the commercial guys pay for commercial rubbish. But the residents are not paying a fee. It comes out of the General Fund. So there’s a disconnect between what it costs them and the cost of doing this. But every time we’ve looked at fee collection, it’s just been the concern over dumping. Maybe you have some line item in the real property taxes and everybody has to pay a fee for solid waste. I think there are some legal issues there because real property taxes are based on value. And so the question is whether you’re going to have state authority to add a fee to that tax. But I was always looking at something you can actually collect. Cause Wastewater, the problem was that you can’t shut the water off. Water Supply, when you owe them money on your water bill, they send you a little notice, saying we’re going to cut your water off. So you want your water, you run down there and you pay it. When you’re on the sewer, there is no mechanism to shut you off, to shut you down. So you can continue to pay your water bill and have your water and still be flushing your toilet and not pay your sewer fee. So that’s always been the problem with collecting - that there was no hammer in theory. On landfills you can cut off the commercial guys from coming in. But the residential component, a question is are you going to have it paid out of real property taxes or are you going to have some kind of a fee? And if you’re going to have a fee, how do you implement a fee that doesn’t end up making a lot of guys just dump. Cause right now when it’s free, and you’re not seeing not a dime come out of your pocket to go to the landfill, guys are still dumping everywhere. And so the concern is that if you had to pay a fee at the transfer station, the amount of dumping will just double, triple, quadruple. And then you end up paying for it anyway because we end up having to go to cleanups and take it in and pay to landfill it. So, I’ve always thought that it had to be something like a fee that’s collected through real property taxes because there is a hammer. Eventually you lose your property if you don’t pay that bill. It’s either that or you have to go with the percentage, and that, Finance is definitely opposed to it because you lose your flexibility inI managing your budget. MS. O’HARA: Percentage of what? MS. LEITHEAD-TODD: Percentage of your collections for a particular –it’s like you have 2% for open space. And the problem is that when you look at this year when we’re facing a real tight budget, and you allocate 2% for the open space, that $4 million or $3.6 million, whatever it is that you can’t use it on other expenses. And that’s the danger of having fixed amounts in the budget. When you’re in a crunch, you lose that flexibility of adjusting. And it’s fine in times of plenty. But in times of, when you’re really looking at,can you produce services, having fixed percentages in the real property 30