Trash plan is just a pile of rubbish
Feb 13, 2008 04:30 AM
TORONTO STAR
Royson James
Michael Orr's is a voice crying in the wilderness – seeking "fairness" from a city hall that lost touch with that ethic the moment the administration decided it was going to pick people's pockets instead of tax them in traditional ways.
Orr, a father of seven children, aged 18 months to 15 years, has been bombarding the mayor with emails asking, for instance: How is it fair to limit his family members to a garbage output of half a bag of garbage each every two weeks?
And, why is the city hitting him up twice for waste management while offering him 75 per cent of the service?
We'll explain later. But the best he's received by way of an answer is that the planning team will review his concerns.
The team will do no such thing. Money grab, not fairness, is what drives the new "pay even if you don't throw plan" for garbage. For example, last June, they said the plan would net about $54 million extra. Now, they've increased the take to $74 million and rising. Soon, garbage fees will be covering any municipal budgets costs a mayor wants to hide.
Until now, Torontonians paid for garbage out of their property taxes. About 90 per cent of households use the blue box and green bin.
When the city started drafting an aggressive waste-reduction plan to achieve 70 per cent waste diversion, some thought a pay-by-the-bag system would encourage reduction. Jane Pitfield – remember her? – proposed this idea. David Miller, running against her in the last election, opposed it. Miller won and so the flexible, simple, workable, tried-and-true bag tag system was doomed.
Enter the dandy, dastardly alternative. Let's make more than a million bins and force all ratepayers to use them. We can sell the bins at exorbitant amounts, increase the charges annually and use the gold mine to fund all kinds of initiatives in the name of Going Green.
Besides, we can socially engineer the plan to hit disproportionately those we want to hurt and shield those we want to spare. Once in place, the manoeuvrings would be detectable only to the most ardent.
So, last summer, the plan was hatched and sold as the most environmentally friendly proposal of all time. Few bothered to check how people would haul these monster bins to their basements or up to the third floor of a triplex or navigate narrow side yards or store them on front porches.
Cut your waste and you will be fine, we were told. You can avoid waste charges by recycling.
So, let's look at Orr's case.
Using the city's figures and calculations, he now pays about $600 of his property taxes toward waste management. So, you'd think if we are going to a pay-as-you-throw system he'd get that money rebated. That would be fair.
Instead, the city proposes to give all households a $209 rebate, the amount the average ratepayer now contributes. If you're paying $120 toward waste management now, you get a windfall from the pockets of people like Orr. Meanwhile, Orr is out almost $400. But who's counting? Not the social engineers at city hall.
It gets worse.
Orr's large family needs the largest bin, capacity 4.5 bags, every two weeks. That'll cost him $399.
In all he's contributing $1,000, getting a rebate of $200. And his family is down to half a bag each every two weeks. He's paying more, even as he's recycling more and cutting his trash output by 25 per cent. "They're hitting me both ways and charging me two times." And Orr's not alone.
Royson James usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
rjames@thestar.ca
