A rant from 2009, and all these fees on my tax bill have gone up.
A preliminary report from the City of Ottawa garbage folks has floated the idea of removing the Garbage Collection portion of the City Taxes and turn it into a user fee. With this move City Taxes will drop by $86 which sounds like a nice idea, however, the User Fee for Garbage is slated to be $195 per household which is about a 115% increase in the cost of paying for Garbage in Ottawa.
How is this possible? Let’s look a little closer:
- $86 is our original garbage fee, so we’ll keep that
- $41 fee for the black and blue box program in place (say that 5 times fast)
- $68 for the new Green Bin program for organics and compost and such
Now that is an expensive program. If you are a rural Ottawa person you won’t have to pay for the Green Bins, since you won’t have them, but you’ll still have your garbage fee go up by around 50%.
My suspicion is that garbage collection will become more like water and sewers and will become a bi-monthly billed program, which will then spiral in price to match the cost of garbage collection.
Do I have any other options here? No, I can’t opt out, I can’t claim I don’t use the service, so I must pay, as must my neighbours.
