AUSTIN, Texas — Starting this month, Austin Resource Recovery (ARR) customers paying for trash collection services will see their bill go up slightly.
As a part of the 2019-2020 budget, Austin City Council approved an increase to ARR's trash collection base rate fee by $0.65 a month. Equivalently, that is $7.80 more a year.
Here is how that will affect a customer's total base cost:
- $24.30/month to 24.95/month
- $291.60/year to $299.40/year
Gena McKinley, the strategic initiatives division manager for ARR, said that based on a cost of service study the department conducted, they were not charging enough for the base fee which supports trash, recycling, curbside compost, brush and bulk collection.
"The past couple years, (it has) really been costing us more to provide that service than we are charging, so we held off a couple of years, but at this point, we had to do a $.65 increase to realign the cost of the service to those rates," she said.
This increase will help fund the City's goal to be Zero Waste by 2040, McKinley added. A part of that project is the Curbside Compost project they rolled out to 52,000 customers in September. The additional funds will go towards providing the service to the remainder of their customers in 2020.
"It takes a big effort to get there, and we try our best to provide a wide variety of options and services for our community to divert materials from the landfill and our rates and our fees help us do that," she said.
In the proposed budget, ARR suggested off-setting the increase in the trash collection fee by decreasing the City's clean community fee.
However, as the plan was reviewed, the city council decided to postpone the reduction in cost to the clean community fee. According to the council revisions, they intend to generate a detailed report of (1) current City-funded community cleaning services and (2) a cost of service study for ways in which we could expand those services.
The council requested that, no later than the Nov. 12 council work session, the city manager should bring a report back to the city council with information on these reports.
Meanwhile, for customers concerned about reducing costs, McKinley suggested trying to utilize the trash and recycling bins more, and exchange trash bins for a smaller size.
The City offers four different trash bin sizes and costs.
"Recycling and composting really shifts that material out of the trash cart and sends it to a higher and better use, which not only benefits our community but also benefits the ratepayer because they have the opportunity to offset those increases and reduce their individual bill," McKinley said.
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