Solid waste fees adjusted

An ‘imperfect’ plan

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — After what lawmakers called outrage from the community, the legislature voted on January 19 to adjust the user fees that property owners will pay to help fund the county’s solid waste system.

Some of the loudest complaints came from owners of commercial properties, which had been divided into four categories with the lowest fee being $350 and highest being $850. Lawmakers voted to change that to a flat rate, for every commercial building in the county, of $300. The result is that very large businesses such as Wal-Mart in Monticello will pay the same fee as antique shops or sandwich shops.

Another change is the fee for cottages, camps and bungalows, which had been set at about half the rate of a single family home, which is $84.95 per year. The newly adopted rule caps the rate to be charged by any bungalow colony or camp at $850, the same as the cap for mobile home parks. This cap has brought complaints from some members of the community who have said it is unfair to have mobile homes in large parks end up paying a fee as little as $4.50 per year in the largest parks.

Other changes to the fee structure included lowering those for fire houses, ambulance buildings, museums and buildings that house veteran organizations to $84.95 per year. The fee for religious properties that contain a single house of worship, or a house of worship and a residence for a clergy person, was also lowered to $84.95. The fee for buildings owned by towns and villages was capped at $850.

The county treasurer warned lawmakers that if they adopted these new fees, they would be creating a hole in the budget this year, which could amount to $700,000. He also said that because the county based the fee schedule on real property codes used by New York State, there was no clear rationale for some of the new fees, and that they might be challenged.

Lawmakers, however, said that they were trying to make the best of an admittedly flawed and imperfect system that had been adopted in a hurried process. They said that a new task force to re-evaluate the solid waste fees would be created in the very near future to consider major changes to the system for 2011.

Among the changes that will be considered is whether the county should create a solid waste district or authority as opposed to the adoption of fees. This might result in payments that were more closely linked to the actual amount of solid waste generated by each building.

Also at the meeting were several tax assessors and tax collectors from some of the 15 towns in the county who let lawmakers know that these last-minute changes were creating a large amount of additional work for them because they must now send out amended tax bills for 2010.