Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for November 5th, 2009

A preliminary report from the City of Ottawa garbage folks has floated the idea of removing the Garbage Collection portion of the City Taxes and turn it into a user fee. With this move City Taxes will drop by $86 which sounds like a nice idea, however, the User Fee for Garbage is slated to be $195 per household which is about a 115% increase in the cost of paying for Garbage in Ottawa.

How is this possible? Let’s look a little closer:

• $86 is our original garbage fee, so we’ll keep that
• $41 fee for the black and blue box program in place (say that 5 times fast)
• $68 for the new Green Bin program for organics and compost and such

Now that is an expensive program. If you are a rural Ottawa person you won’t have to pay for the Green Bins, since you won’t have them, but you’ll still have your garbage fee go up by around 50%.

My suspicion is that garbage collection will become more like water and sewers and will become a bi-monthly billed program, which will then spiral in price to match the cost of garbage collection.

Do I have any other options here? No, I can’t opt out, I can’t claim I don’t use the service, so I must pay, as must my neighbours.

Care to complain? November 10th is your day.  Read the briefing notes, very interesting accounting discussions there.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day

For those with any UK heritage it is, in fact, Guy Fawkes day today. Hopefully there aren’t any more gunpowder plots out there!