SNOW HILL — Acknowledging that it is only a temporary fix, the Worcester County Commissioners approved an increase in permit fees for homeowners to dump in the county landfill.
The county will also be implementing a less traditional Pay As You Throw (PAYT) pilot program next year. Even with the increased fees, however, the county is still in the red when operating the Solid Waste Fund and the commission plans to explore the possibility of adding some kind of surcharge onto residential tax bills in the future to offset costs.
The question of how to address the nearly $1 million deficit that the Solid Waste Department operates at has been floating around for years. This week, Commission President Bud Church admitted the county doesn’t have much more than a “Band-Aid” solution for now and that by raising fees it could at least stem the bleeding.
The commissioners were presented with three options for how to raise fees. They chose to raise the current $60 annual permit fee to $100, but will allow that $100 to pay for up to two vehicle stickers as long as both vehicles are registered to the same household. A third sticker will cost an additional $100. They will also be implementing a PAYT pilot program as an alternative next year at $1 a bag. PAYT will work on a punch card system sold in $10 increments at various county facilities.
While the changes are expected to cut into the operating deficit of solid waste, the department is still anticipated to remain in the red for about $790,000 heading into the next fiscal year. It would be difficult to combat that deficit by continuously raising fees, noted Church. He drew attention to the fact that no matter how much permits cost some residents abuse the system and use one vehicle to collect trash from entire neighborhoods sometimes.
“I’ll tell you what the solution is going to be and nobody is going to want to hear it, but somehow we’re going to have to incorporate it into the taxes,” he said, “so that everyone pays their fair share. It won’t be $100, but then everybody in the county is going to pay $5, and I’m picking numbers out of the air, and spread it out over the entire county. That’s going to be the only solution.”
The solid waste advisory committee has discussed something similar to that, according to Jessica Ramsay, Enterprise Fund Controller. An environmental and recycling surcharge could be added to the county tax bill to offset some of the solid waste deficit. While it wouldn’t be implemented this cycle, the county would need to bring the issue to the Maryland legislature this year if it sought to implement it the year after. The commissioners agreed they did want to pursue the idea, though that doesn’t mean they have committed to implement it.
Voting to move forward with the increased fees and looking into surcharges caused the commission to experience a minor split. The vote went 5-2, with Commissioners Jim Bunting and Merrill Lockfaw opposed. Both cited complaints about how the increased fees would impact residents without doing enough to fix the underlying deficit issues.
The $100 fee wasn’t a good solution and would unequally impact people who only dump a small volume of waste every year, said Lockfaw. But that is what the $1 per bag PAYT program is for, countered Commissioner Virgil Shockley.
“That’s actually the saving grace on all of this,” he said.
Lockfaw agreed that there was some merit to the pilot program but argued that it was only a “partial solution to the problem, it is not the solution.”
Bunting favored searching for more creative ways to make up lost revenue, including a possible increase on commercial permitting instead of putting it all squarely on residential. The county was wary of that path, however, as the $25 commercial permits are mostly used for tracking and a hike in those fees could easily influence commercial drivers to head outside of the county to deposit their trash.
“If they end up crossing local boundaries and they end up closer to Wicomico, they’ll take it to Wicomico,” said John Tustin, director of Public Works, “even though they picked it up in Worcester. It’s all about routing and the profit margin.”
Also worth noting is that of the 420 commercial permits sold over the last fiscal year, 170, or 40 percent, of those were exempt from fees because they were governmental or municipal uses.
In the end, while not happy about it, the commission felt the increases were justified. Commissioner Louise Gulyas argued that it would be unfair to add any environmental or recycling surcharge onto every residential tax bill down the road since Ocean City, her district, doesn’t even participate in the county’s solid waste program or operate recycling. That issue won’t be decided this year but many of the other commissioners have indicated that they would at least consider something on the tax bill.
Commissioner Jim Purnell reluctantly voted to raise the fees, but agreed that the problem is only being shuffled down the road.
“We’re going to have to do something here today but that’s not going to be the final solution,” he said. “This time next year you’ll be sitting here in this same building doing the same identical thing.”