Niagara Falls City Council weighs garbage fee renewal
Oct. 19—The Niagara Falls City Council is once again weighing the proposed renewal of the city's recycling and refuse fee for 2025.
The fee, first established in the 2019 city budget, helps to defray the cost of the Falls' recycling and refuse program.
Under the amendment to the City Charter that created the fee, the city controller is required every year to "make an estimate of user fees and probable revenues to be received" by the recycling and refuse program for both the current and upcoming city fiscal years. That estimate must be submitted to the council no later than Sept. 15.
An estimate prepared by acting City Controller Maria Brown, and submitted to the council members, shows projected 2024 user fee revenue of $3,985,452 and the same exact expected collections for 2025.
The estimate is based on an assumption of close to 100% collection of the fee. Mayor Robert Restaino said the city's user fee collections have, historically, been in the mid- to high-90 percentile.
It also assumes that the council, in reauthorizing the fee, will not change the base rate of $181 per year for residential properties and $225 for commercial users.
Brown's estimate also shows an expected recycling and refuse program cost of $4,823,328, under a contract with the city's third-party provider Casella Waste Management. That creates a gap of $837,876 between the revenue generated by the use fee and the cost of the recycling and refuse program.
That deficit would have to be made up with cash from the city budget's general fund.
"We have given the council the information regarding the refuse fee and what would be necessary to close that gap," Restaino said.
The mayor said with the current fee covering only 82.6% of the program cost, the council could need to increase the fee by 17% to eliminate the deficit. A 17% increase would set the fee at $212.
When the fee was first establish, then-Mayor Paul Dyster had proposed a $218-per-year solid waste disposal fee. However, that city council cut the $181 a year or just over $15 a month.
Since then, the fee, which is billed directly to property owners, has never been raised. It has, as required by law, been reauthorized every year as part of the city's budget approval process.
While the fee has not increased since it was imposed, the city's cost of garbage collection has increased. Restaino said that if the city had not switched providers from Modern Corp to Casella, the program's estimated 2025 cost would have been $2 million higher.
To cover the difference between what is collected through the fee and the actual cost of the recycling and refuse program, the city has used an allocation from its general fund to fill the gap.
"There has always been a contribution from the general fund (to cover the recycling and refuse program cost)," Restaino said.
The mayor also noted that the recycling and refuse fee was "not originally rolled out" as a collection fee and had never been based directly on the cost of the program's contract, but rather on the number of garbage and recycling totes assigned to properties across the city.
By law, the fee cannot be increased by more than 3.5%t per year. Eliminating the fee would create a more than $4.2 million budget gap for the city in 2025.
"This is (the council's) decision," Restaino said. "We give them the information and they make the decision (on the recycling and refuse fee)."
The council has set a public hearing for 6 p.m. on Nov. 6 to consider the fee renewal.
