Ward 11 Alderman Brian Pincott | City of Calgary Office of the Aldermen

On Wednesday, Committee approved a $4 per month user fee for waste collection. While I expressed considerable hesitation about this, and challenged the administration report, I ended up voting in favour of this. I thought I would give a bit of clarfication as to my reasoning.

Our waste collection system is broken. It is not sustainable either environmentally or fiscally. Environmentally, we know that we are lagging behind everyone else by not just years but decades. Cities, towns and rural areas across the country had recycling pickup start decades ago. We are only just starting ours in April 2009! What that means is that as we are moving forward with recycling, everyone else in the country is moving forward with the next phase which is true waste reduction. Other cities are implementing things like bag limits, extra charges for those who produce more garbage. We need to get to this point, but we still have to get the first step out of the way.

When it comes to the financial side, currently, waste collection is covered by our taxes. Literally, only the equipment and labour to pick up our garbage is covered by our taxes. Leaving the costs of landfilling, our blue box program and any future costs associated with the landfills, to be covered by landfill tipping fees. In the end, about 50% of the cost of our residential waste system is actually paid for by the producers of that waste... namely, us! That means that we have been taking funds from areas that we shouldn't in order to keep residential costs lower and that is completely unsustainable.

So, the "fix" to this broken system as brought forward by administration was a user fee, and supplemented by funds from the gas tax transfer. I think this is short sighted. We have a broken system, and the remedy is a bandaid that doesn't actually deal with the broken system. A user fee that is applied to everyone, whether you produce one bag of garbage a week or 10, is not moving us forward. I believe that we must have "usage fees" that encourage people to not produce as much waste. Then, those that are producing it, are actually paying their fair share.

In the end, after much discussion with administration, I supported the changes because I was assured that it is an interm step and, we will move forward quickly to revamp the system and begin to get fairness into it. There is an overwhelming fiscal imbalance in the sytem that has to be addressed immediately, the user fee essentially buys us a bit of time to be to able to come up with the real solutions.