Santa Ana city leaders are already talking about raising taxes in order to spend even more on public safety, and now apparently there is also talk about raising trash disposal rates. The O.C. Register reported this week that the “City Council on Monday will consider raising trash rates for office buildings, apartments and homes.”
“Single-family homes would be charged $15.90 a month for curbside service, up 3.7 percent from what they currently pay. For businesses, the cost of removing trash from a three-yard bin would rise 5.8 percent to $102.22 a month, according to the city staff report.
The increases
Right on Art! This council continues to raise taxes because they don’t want to face down the Unions or the Chamber of Commerce! You have given them lots of ideas on how to cut the budget but it takes a spine to do it. Barking Dogs? Why stop with dogs? What about cats that crap all over my lawn? Can you fine the owners? They bother me more than the dogs and the cats don’t even pay a license. Let’s license cats first. Are the barking dogs any worse than the gas blowers the gardners use? City Attorney Joe Fletcher has lost so many law suits you would think he would get the picture after a while.
Art and Company, would you please let us know how these votes go after the meetings? Why not a “These people voted to increase your taxes by increasing Trash fees” with a photo and name of the councilmember and then reward those who vote against it with an Ataboy!
Sorry..don’t mean to be sexist…or an “Atagirl”!!!:)
Poster 2,
Absolutely! We will let our readers know the outcome of the meeting.
I will definitely laud those who vote the right way re the trash increase, the dog ordinance, the raises for the city managers, and the overall budget.
Art,
I’m confident you know very well how to address the council and ask tough questions, but some questions I’d like to hear addressed are:
1. What is the annual expected revenue amount?
2. Into what fund will the revenue be collected?
3. What are planned expenditures, and does this revenue cover all program costs? If not, how will balance of expenditure be secured?
4. Depending on the answers to #3, ask City Attorney why do these fee’s not fall under prop 218 regulations?
5. Why are businesses paying for needle and unused paint programs? They are not the sources for these items?
6. Other cities across OC have these programs in place without such significant fees. In fact the dirversion of these items from the waste stream aid cities in meeting 50% state diversion mandates.
Sorry for so many ???’s, but we’ve seen Catherine Standiford in 3 different cities try to use the trash contracts to feed the General Fund. She seems to have a formula, 1st fear of loosing cops, in this case gangs to raise a tax. 2nd raising user fees, 3rd be on the lookout for mis-management of enterprise funds such as sanitation, streets, water or sewer. They call it cost allocations, but it is basically stealing from restricted funds to free spending money from the General Fund.
Waste management appears to be ill equipped to handle a minor increase in it’s operating cost and is therefore forced to beg Santa Ana for a rate hike.
Yet, From 01/01/06 to 12/31/06, Waste Management gave 337,082.26 to political campaigns statewide.
Maybe if they stopped handing out the cash, they could afford to operate without begging