It’s no big surprise that garbage rates are going up again.
Like utility charges and taxes, the cost of getting rid of stuff never goes down. During a proposed doubling of garbage rates in the mid-1990s, one lifetime resident told the Chilkat Valley News, “Whatever I can’t burn, I’m flushing down the toilet.”
And so it goes.
Local waste handler Community Waste Solutions, a private company, cites predictable reasons businesses say they need more money: Difficulty finding workers, rising fuel costs, increased freight and electric bills, et cetera.
Haines Borough Assembly members were concerned enough to about the hike to broach the issue at a committee meeting Tuesday. But understanding this issue requires some background and history.
Unlike most towns in Alaska except Juneau, the Haines landfill and the garbage collection service are both owned privately. Most municipalities own landfills and contract with a private company to pick up your trash.
Also unlike most Alaska towns, subscription to trash pick-up service in Haines is not compulsory. In many other cities, the trash man comes once or twice a week and you pay either a garbage utility bill or the cost of service is added to your property tax bill.
That system makes some sense, as aging or stored garbage quickly becomes a nuisance, particularly where folks live in proximity to one another.
The former City of Haines required residential pick-up for years, but that regulation collapsed when residents challenged it in the mid-1980s.
Opponents pointed to disposal outside city limits, where their neighbors were permitted to take their garbage to the landfill themselves and pay for disposal on a per-pound basis. They also argued that the government couldn’t force them to subscribe to a private company’s service.
The city backed down and the self-haul option seemed a democratic and Alaskan solution, every man to his own garbage and all that, but it hasn’t worked out.
While self-haul allowed customers to take their trash directly to the dump, there’s nothing in law requiring them to do that and little in the way of enforcement to keep them from saving money by dumping their trash along roadsides or burning it in their back yards.
Further, because the cost of self-haul was based on weight instead of volume, law-abiding consumers learned to reduce their self-haul cost nearly to zero by recycling most all their trash, including by composting food waste. Some folks boasted that a plastic trash bag full of plastic bags was all they ever took to the landfill.
Either way, Community Waste Solutions wasn’t making much money, or at least not enough to keep the company profitable as it attempts to dispose of trash through a system that includes sorting, recycling and composting.
(Company manager Craig Franke told the assembly Tuesday that the company didn’t have money enough to fix its electric fence when he went to work there in 2019. That breakdown led to the shooting of dozens of brown bears that had become habituated to garbage at the landfill.)
So Community Waste Solutions has changed its fee structure, basing its landfill rates on volume instead of weight and creating an “express lane” for customers who use its orange disposal bags.
Assemblywoman Cheryl Stickler, who chairs the committee that met this week, said recently that she feared rising disposal costs would lead to more illegal dumping and burning of garbage around town. She supports the company’s orange-bag arrangement and wants residents to take advantage of it.
She also expressed support for the borough sponsoring a public education campaign to help residents understand their best options for safe, legal and economic disposal of their wastes.
If illegal dumping or burning increase, Stickler said the borough might consider requiring garbage pick-up as the City of Haines once did, but that should come only after citizens are provided the option of handling their waste responsibly, she said.
Stay tuned.