LETTER: Some facts on garbage collection
By Contributor
Dear editor,
The City of Rossland garbage tax is $85 per year. Of that money
- $50 goes to the contractor (Davies Sales and Service) for weekly pickup at curbside and delivery to the Trail landfill (that’s only 98 cents per week per household).
- $35 goes to the City for spring and fall debris curbside pick up (the City raised this cost from $15 because of tipping fees.
Blue bags were brought in to encourage recycling and to reduce waste. They were sold by the City. The more garbage you produce, the more you pay: that’s why garbage is only $85 per year instead of the $2-300 per year that some cities charge. This is a really fair system as a pensioner putting one small bag out every second week only pays $.75 while a family putting out six bags a week pays $9. If you take a large bag to the dump yourself, the tipping fee is $2.
The City turned blue bags over to the contractor (Davies) for distribution to residents through retail stores. Blue bags are now replaced by stickers in order to pay the regional tipping fee. Stickers cost $.75 for a small bag and $1.50 for a large one. Each load Davies takes to the dump goes by weight and costs on average $1000 in tipping fees. He dumps twice a week (sometimes more in summer)–that’s $8-12 000/month to the regional district in tipping fees.
Davies was finding hard to find a company to produce City of Rossland garbage bags. You can’t order them direct from the producer–you have to go through a broker first–but the bags got too expensive and the last batch were very flimsy. People were having to put the blue bag in a black bag. That’s why they went to stickers–to keep the cost of garbage pick up where it had been for many years with no increase to residents.
So Davies isn’t gouging the public, like a few residents seem to think. Davies has been serving the citizens of Rossland for 76 years.
Ed Davies
Rossland
