Council has its fill

Residents to pay for extra bins

ALL Geelong residents with extra bins will be forced to pay for them from January, as the council moves to a user-pays waste collection system.

As the cost of servicing the thousands of extra bins has topped $600,000 annually, administrators have voted to start individually charging all users from January.

The council introduced a policy in July last year that imposed an annual fee on people who made new requests for additional bins.

Now it is preparing to target all those who want to access the extra collection, imposing annual fees of $135 for an additional rubbish bin and $48 for an extra recycling bin.

Only residents requiring an extra bin for medical reasons would be exempt from paying the additional fee.

As first revealed in the Geelong Advertiser last month, the new scheme targets users of an extra 9049 bins across the city.

City services director Will Tieppo said demand for extra bins had slowed markedly over the past year, with many users handing bins back to the council.

However the council expects a significant uptake to a paying service, noting that a 40 per cent conversion would generate $360,000 in extra revenue a year.

Administrators are also preparing to retrieve the scores of outstanding stolen bins, which the Geelong Advertiser understands could be as high as 2000.

More than $250,000 has been budgeted in 2017-18 to reclaim the bins for which people do not pay.

Administrator Peter Dorling said the new system was equitable and in line with policies of other councils.

“This is about making it fair,” Mr Dorling said.