Saskatoon city hall must dig out of this garbage

The 12 months ahead might feel like an election year at Saskatoon city hall.

A reversal on user fees for garbage collection earlier this month leaves city council and voters staring down a 4.7 per cent property tax increase in 2020.

Voters will head to the polls in 2020 and will probably be feeling ornery if they’re hit with a property tax hike near eight per cent.

The 4.7 per cent increase would be needed to pay for a new organics program for single-family homes, but in the 2019 budget an increase of 3.16 per cent was needed just to maintain existing services.

So cue the effort to reduce the tax hike. City hall only has two real options to pay for an ongoing program like organics collection: Property taxes or user fees.

Property tax presents several issues, chiefly the amount of the increase.

Also, that huge increase would be spread evenly across all property classes. Businesses and people who live in apartments or townhouses will be hit with the same increase as single-family homes.

Only single-family homes, however, will get the new organics/composting service.

Folks grudgingly accepted property tax hikes of 7.43 per cent in 2014 and 5.34 per cent in 2015 because they were justified by increased spending on road repair.

The poor condition of Saskatoon’s roads consistently topped surveys of residents’ concerns. Roads topped the City of Saskatoon’s 2018 civic survey, too, but by a smaller margin.

Taxes came in second, but a tax increase to improve roads was seen as bringing a city-wide benefit.

You can certainly try to argue the same is true of an organics program that diverts material from the landfill, but it will be seen as more of a stretch.

The push to divert more material from the landfill has environmental and financial implications because the cost to replace the city’s landfill is estimated to be at least $125 million.

Even with the cost of a new organics pickup program, sticking with the status quo on dealing with waste was expected to cost $5 million more a year over time due to the looming landfill liability.

Both the North Saskatoon Business Association and the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce advised council not to reverse the garbage collection fees. But Coun. Darren Hill did what he signalled and reversed his vote on user fees from four weeks earlier.

Given that fees were rejected for trash collection — and there’s indication they were unpopular — it appears unlikely they will now be adopted to pay for the organics program.

Single-family homes and duplexes account for about 60 per cent of dwellings in Saskatoon, so it seems politically unwise to dump the entire cost of the organics program on the voters living in them, even though they will be the ones to benefit directly.

That leaves some sort of combination of taxes and fees. Lower the property tax hike and introduce modest fees?

That would still be challenging for an election year when council has generally worked hard to keep the tax increase minimal. Here are Saskatoon’s last six election-year property tax increases: 3.96 per cent (2016), four (2012), 2.87 (2009), 1.86 (2006), 2.88 (2003) and 1.57 (2000).

Will council opt to kill or delay the organics programs, or severely slash other services to keep the tax hike low in 2020?

Listen for politicians to talk about cushioning the blow for taxpayers, which you can probably interpret as saving their own necks.

That could mean raiding a reserve fund for a year or two. This would be rich for the same politicians who were so indignant and sanctimonious two years ago when the provincial government suggested it.

A complicating factor next year comes from the city’s plan for Saskatoon’s first two-year budget, covering 2020 and 2021, which will make it tougher to hide an ongoing cost.

So, are trash changes always so difficult? Moose Jaw switched fairly seamlessly to a user-pay garbage utility model in 2017, while the City of Regina is moving to an organics collection service.

Regina is also contemplating garbage user fees, so it will be interesting to see if the Queen City ends up in as big a mess as Saskatoon.