Facing a garbage service delinquency rate of 10 percent, the Bonney Lake City Council has implemented a cheaper service option to incentivize more citizens to sign up. The ordinance, which passed the consent agenda unanimously May 28, represents the most comprehensive revision of the city’s sanitation code since its original writing in 1977.
The ordinance allows residents to choose a “micro can” garbage pick-up option at less than $14 per month, according to DM Disposal’s most recent rate sheet. At 10 gallons, the micro can is now the smallest and cheapest available receptacle for curb-side pickup.
The code revision is a bet on the power of positive economic incentives to encourage residents to comply with the law.
“(Fines are) not a practical way to enforce garbage pick-up,” said Gary Leaf. Leaf is the Facilities and Special Projects Manager for Bonney Lake, and spearheaded the amendments to the sanitation code. “And liens (a method of debt collection tied to property) are expensive.”
Leaf added later that there are also legal questions surrounding the lien system: “Once we (the city) stopped doing our own billing, the city attorney questioned whether we could legally issue a lien against a property that hadn’t signed on for garbage pick-up.”
Punitive measures against residents who did not sign up for garbage were more straightforward prior to 2004, when the city transferred the responsibility of garbage billing to its contractor, Leaf said. Before then, water, sewer and garbage services were packaged into one bill.
“(The city) paid the water last,” Leaf said. “So if a customer didn’t pay their garbage bill, they really weren’t paying their water bill.”
Though non-compliance remains a Class 1 civil infraction punishable by fine, fines were suspended in 2009 in recognition of the soft economy. At the time, about 5 percent of Bonney Lake households were not signed up for pickup. In late 2012, the rate ballooned to 10 percent, prompting DM Disposal to approach the city council in December. DM sent out 500 letters to unsigned households that month.
The meaningful rate of noncompliance is tricky to pin down. DM calculates the rate from residential addresses that aren’t signed on for service. At a March 5 workshop discussion of the issue, Leaf reported a majority of non-compliant households were vacated residences. At the same meeting, he also reported that the number of noncompliant households had gone down to 350.
Concerning legitimate unsigned households, the prevailing theory throughout council discussion of the issue has been that said households are opting to take their waste to the dump; possibly out of a perception that it is cheaper to do so.
“In actuality, one-can weekly service is equal in cost to taking your trash to the dump,” Leaf said.
The city garbage code now includes language allowing for pick-up every other week. Biweekly pickup is not a currently available option for Bonney Lake residents, but the language was added in anticipation of new waste contract negotiations to take place this summer, Leaf said. The code revisions also included updates to bring city law in line with state and county law in areas such as garbage incineration.
