Washington County proposes waste fee hike, sets public hearing

   The Washington County Board of Commissioners is holding a public hearing Monday, July 26 at 1 p.m. to discuss a proposed increase in solid waste fees.
 County residents are encouraged to attend the hearing, which will be held at the Washington County Courthouse, located at 256 E. Court St. in Weiser.
 Jerod Odoms, the County’s Road and Bridge, and Solid Waste supervisor, told commissioners in a recent meeting that an increase in fees is required to meet rising costs associated with running the County’s transfer sites in Weiser and Midvale.
 “The numbers I came up with … [are] anywhere from a 10 to 21 percent increase to the special assessment fee, which is $6 to $12 per unit,” he said.
 The special assessment is the annual fee attached to households for waste disposal at the sites. Weekly home trash collection is a separate service handled by the cities of Weiser and Midvale, respectively.
 Although the County levy rate for the taxing district has gone up and down over the last five years, the Washington County solid waste flat fee of $56 per year, per household has held steady for over a decade, according to Odoms.
 The taxing district is allowed a three percent increase to the levy annually.
 “The special assessment is based on what we call a unit, which is based on four cubic yards per month,” Odoms told the Weiser Signal American. “A unit is your standard household and how much trash is produced in your kitchen, your bathroom, things like that … your normal household trash.”
The assessment appears on each household’s tax statement sent out annually by the County Treasurer’s Office.
 “The last time the assessment was raised, was in 2000,” he told the Weiser Signal American. “The levy has gone up and down over the last five years. It went up once, then we lowered it and then it bumped up again a couple of times. So, after some discussion, it’s better to use the fee than it is to use the levy because the fee is based off the amount of garbage produced whereas the levy is based off the value of your home and property. That’s why we’d rather adjust the assessment.”
 Odoms is seeking $12 per year, per house increase, which will allow the County to sustain a reasonable budget in the face of rising costs, many of which have come in the wake of the pandemic, he said.
 The current annual budget is approximately $620,000.
 “We are going to try to do the special assessment and catch that up with our current needs,” Odoms said. “The price of everything is increasing, our repair costs, fuel costs, labor and everything. Our facility is aging, it needs repairs; the scale is aging. Our processes aren’t changing, yet we are seeing more garbage come, which means we have to haul more garbage out.”
 As transfer stations, everything that comes in, must go back out. The County sustains a contract with Clay Peak Landfill located within Payette County. At the Weiser site, 53-foot semi trailers make as many as four runs to the landfill in Payette per day, depending on the day.
 “We are also seeing an increase at the Upper Country (Midvale) site,” Odoms said. “We are seeing a lot of new people move in, some more building and a lot of cleanup-type stuff. We normally make one run per week there, but because we are only open half a day, for four days a week, we’ve started to have to run twice a week, so that’s a big jump. We’ve never seen that amount of garbage come there.”
 Odoms added that he is not in the position to hire more employees.
 “I don’t have an increase in my employees, so it’s more taxing on them,” he said. “It’s busier and because of everything with COVID, it was harder to get parts; it was harder to get things taken care of, so if something broke, we got backed up. Things are far more expensive than they were two years ago.”
 Here is a list of the proposed increases:
    Current    Proposed
City Residential    $56    $68
Commercial    $56    $68
Apartment Complex
(Per housing unit)    $44    $56
Industrial    $56    $68
Rural Residential    $56    $68
Mobile Homes    $56    $68
Residential/Comm.    $56    $68
Exempt Property    $56    $68
Circuit Breaker    $38    $50
Motel
(Per housing unit)    $30    $42