Star: City ponders garbage fees

[wyliepoon]

Link to article

City ponders garbage fees

Apr 03, 2007 12:57 PM
John Spears
City Hall Bureau

Would you like your garbage bin small, medium or jumbo?

Toronto householders could soon be asked to choose the size of their garbage container – and be billed a monthly garbage pick-up fee according to the size of their bin.

City staff have worked up a proposal to be floated to politicians this week that would set pay-as-you-throw fees for garbage.

According to one version, households would pay $4 a month for a standard size bin. But they would have the choice of ordering a larger bin – and paying a higher fee – or ordering a smaller bin and paying less. The garbage fees would be mailed out with the water bills.

A $4 a month fee would raise about $25 million a year – money that's now raised through property taxes.

Householders would not be charged higher fees if they fill extra blue boxes or green bins. The idea of the fee is to encourage residents to reduce the amount of garbage going to the dump, not to penalize those who recycle or compost.

Politicians are trying to reduce the strain on property taxes, and instead raise at least some of the money for garbage disposal from a user fee. The model would be the water system, which is funded through water bills, not by taxes.

This year's residential property tax increase will be 3.8 per cent if the budget is approved – about twice the rate of inflation.
A city hall official insisted that the new garbage fees would be offset by a reduction in the over-all property tax burden.

That's the only way it could be sold politically, said Councillor Brian Ashton ( Ward 36, Scarborough Southwest).

"If you don't do that, you're double-taxing," he told the Star's Jim Byers.

"I don't think that would get through council. I think new taxes in general would be a lot more tolerable if done like that. It's more like a tax shift."

 

[prometheus the supremo]

it would encourage more illegal dumping.

 

[thenay]

If they want to add more and more taxes on things people will move out of the city and into the suburbs. It's bad enough they want to raise prop. taxes over the % everyone thought it was going to be.

I personally wouldn't live in T.O in the future, it's heading into a bad direction from what I see.

 

[bizorky]

It would appear that the approach is to simply generate more revenue without doing anything to actually address the problem.

 

[Junglab2002]

I think its a great idea, frankly, which should be applied far more liberally - so long as property taxes are held to lower rates of increase in compensation. Indeed, it appears that the plan will likely involve a compensatory reduction in property taxes, as reported above.

John Barber's take:

Toronto to levy new tax on trash
Costs will weigh heavier in suburbia

JOHN BARBER

The City of Toronto is preparing to introduce a new garbage tax that would apply equally to every property in the city, regardless of its assessed value.

Although not designed to raise new revenue, the waste-disposal levy will radically alter the way waste services are financed, with many households expected to endure significantly higher costs for the privilege of seeing their garbage disappear once a week.

The official intention of the new tax is to remove the cost of waste services from the city's overburdened property-tax base while, at the same time, creating new incentives for reduction and recycling. But the net result will be as many losers as winners.

In a reversal of the usual dynamic of the property tax, the likely winners will be those who own small, expensive houses downtown -- where garbage is easiest to collect but the amount paid for the service, because it is linked to assessment, is highest. The losers will be those who live in suburban neighbourhoods where assessments are generally lower -- and the current cost of garbage collection is discounted accordingly.

As such, the proposed garbage tax stands as the first-ever victory for critics who have long complained that market-value assessment penalizes urban, transit-dependent lifestyles.

It will also be the first of what could become many so-called parcel taxes levied to finance individual municipal services, from roads to street lighting, at a flat rate per "parcel" or property.

As the first large Canadian city to implement a flat tax for waste services, Vancouver endured strong criticism that the measure would favour the rich at the expense of the poor.

Recently, however, the city introduced new features that tie the tax more closely to the cost of servicing individual properties, bringing it closer to a pay-as-you-throw user fee.

Only garbage from city-issued bins is now collected in Vancouver, and householders can choose among four different-sized, different-priced bins, the largest being the most expensive. The result is a fair allocation of costs with "a strong incentive for individuals to reduce waste," according to a Vancouver city report.

Similar incentives are likely to be an integral part of the Toronto scheme, with its potential to reduce waste a key selling point. But its emergence has already inspired calls for the implementation of similar levies to finance other services, mainly as a way to reduce the city's dependence on volatile property taxes.

Paying for more municipal services with parcel taxes and user fees will lessen the shock of annual reassessments, according to advocates, because it limits the role of assessment-linked taxes.

In British Columbia, where they are most widely used, parcel taxes can be paid either at a flat rate or, more interestingly, at rates that vary according to the area or frontage of individual lots. As such, they are a form of the area-based taxation -- sometimes called unit assessment -- that many local reformers urged the province to adopt instead of its current system of so-called current-value assessment.

Local thinking at the time was that the size of a property, rather than its market value, was a better indicator of the cost of servicing it. Torontonians also argued that market-value assessment penalized urban lifestyles while subsidizing high-cost, high-consumption suburban living -- creating powerful incentives that ran counter to any number of official policies favouring compact, transit-dependent communities.

Although Queen's Park rejected those arguments when it imposed the new system a decade ago, the McGuinty government reopened the door with its new City of Toronto Act. The law says no to new sales and income taxes, while saying nothing against parcel taxes.

"It creates a lot of opportunities for the city to make its property-tax policy far more sophisticated," said consultant Richard Joy, who helped draft the new act while working at the province.

In other words, along with new levies on motor vehicles, land sales and alcohol, it's open season on taxes at Toronto city hall.

 

[jeicow]

What's the current bag limit in Toronto anyways? I believe Peel went down to 2 bags as of April 1 and then you pay.

 

[building babel]

Six, I think.

Because of blue box and green bin, I probably produce less than six large bags of garbage a year, so once-a-year collection would be a perfectly acceptable option.

 

[andreapalladio]

I think it's a great idea - if people chose to generate more garbage, they should pay to have it taken away. And if Denzil Minian Wong is opposed to it, it must be a good idea.

If only they would roll out green bins to apartment buildings, I could throw even less away.

 

[building babel]

Have you considered vermicomposting?

 

[andreapalladio]

Even then, there would be no place to dispose of the actual compost, other than the garbage chute.

 

[building babel]

Your ficus maybe?

 

[andreapalladio]

It's thrived on 14 years of benign neglect, I'm not going to start fertilizing it now.

 

[yelluwskys]

Ridiculous! Why don't they just take our pay cheque, and give us back any changes??

 

[andreapalladio]

People still get paid by cheque?

 

[Admiral Beez]

Does any of this apply to the over one million Torontonians who live in apartments? It seems that the city is constantly going after house owners, while doing nothing to curb garbage from apartments.