Waste user fees adopted

Mobile home break questioned

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — “I think that we come back on January 2 and start reviewing this, because one advantage to this system is we can amend it; the other way, we would have had a tax that we couldn’t do anything with. But am I mad as hell? Yes.”

That was lawmaker Leni Binder’s thought just an hour or so before she voted against adopting the user fee to pay for the Sullivan County solid waste system. After she learned that a yes vote would set the fees in stone at least for 2010, she voted no with two of her colleagues to reject the fees. But at the meeting in the government center on December 18, the majority prevailed and the user fee system was voted into law.

Before that happened, however, a major hiccup occurred when Binder and at least five other lawmakers were surprised to learn that some property owners with habitable buildings will be able to opt out of the program. They were under the impression that no habitable buildings would be able to avoid the fee.

County attorney Sam Yasgur explained that if a property owner could prove that none of the solid waste created in the building ended up in any part of the county’s waste system, including the recycling center, then the property owner could be exempted through a grievance process.

He added, however, that the lawmakers had yet to create the grievance panel and system, and the procedures could be fashioned in such a way that opting out would not be too easy.

Another issue about the fees that brought objections from lawmakers was the flat fee that was proposed and passed for mobile homes in parks.

Lawmaker Alan Sorensen said there are three large parks in the eastern part of the county with a combined total of about 540 units. He said that under the $850 flat fee for mobile homes in parks, each unit in the three parks would pay about $4 per household. He said the additional revenue the county would receive if they all paid the full rate for single-family homes was $85.00 Sorensen said that left an unfair burden on the rest of the residents living in single-family homes and apartments who will pay $85.00 per year.

County chair Jonathan Rouis responded that many of the people in these mobile home parks are seniors, and have limited incomes. He said that as a group they generate less solid waste than many single- family homes. He also said that while the fee may not be “fair” it is “equitable.” The three mobile home parks discussed, Blue Sky Homes, Whispering Pines and Twin Lakes, are located in Rouis’ district.

Lawmaker David Sager countered that it might not seem equitable to a senior living alone in a mobile home on an acre or two of land who will have to pay up to 20 times more than the senior living in the mobile home in a trailer park.

According to Sorensen, there are some 1,350 mobile home units in the county, and if each paid the full rate, the amount for other single-family homes and apartments could be reduced by about $2.00 each.

The budget

The county had asked the six unions that represent county workers if the workers would pick up more of their health care expenses or accept unpaid overtime to help save the jobs of 49 county employees that were scheduled to be laid off. The unions rejected those suggestions.

County officials paired down the number of jobs to be cut to about 34, including eight or 10 that will be lost because of the closure of the landfill.

Positions in the departments of Public Health Services, Community Services and the district attorney’s office were among those saved from the ax.

The county will pay for those positions by increasing the property tax from a proposed 5.2 percent to 5.84 percent, and the county also increased the amount of money it projected to be raised by sales tax by $90,000.