L.A. City Council backs huge trash fee hikes for residents
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The Los Angeles City Council moved Friday to dramatically increase trash fees in a bid to raise money and close a billion-dollar budget deficit.
On a 10-1 vote, the council ordered city attorneys to draft an ordinance raising the fees on roughly 740,000 customers, with council members arguing that the city has subsidized the cost of trash pickup for too many years.
Owners of single-family homes and duplexes will see their trash fees go up 54% in the coming budget year, reaching $55.95, up from $36.32.
Fees for smaller apartment buildings — those with three or four units — will be increased to $55.95, up from $24.33, with each unit paying the full fee.
The trash fees will rise each year through 2029, hitting $65.93 for all categories.
For single-family homes and duplexes, that would represent an 81% increase over this year. For buildings with three or four units, the fee for each unit would nearly triple.
On residents’ bimonthly bills from the Department of Water and Power, the increases will show up under the line item “Solid Resource Fee.”
The L.A. City Council is weighing a plan to increase trash fees by 56% for single-family homes and duplexes, while doubling the fee for apartments with three or four units.
Larger apartment buildings would not be covered by the planned trash fee hikes.
Residents can seek to overturn the fees. Proposition 218, passed by California voters in 1996, requires that property owners be mailed information about the proposed fees and that a hearing be held at least 45 days after the mailing.
The fee fails if a majority of owners send in written protests.
Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, said landlords will likely pass the fee increase on to tenants who renew a lease or sign a new lease. He expressed concern about the regressive nature of the fee, which will disproportionately hurt low-income residents, since they will pay the same amount as wealthier residents.
Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, who represents the eastern San Fernando Valley, expressed a similar concern at Friday’s City Council meeting as he cast the lone “no” vote.
He pointed out the dramatic increase that residents of a four-unit building will see in the first year. “That unit is going to pay as much as a home in the wealthiest parts of the city,” he said.
Councilmembers John Lee, Traci Park, Monica Rodriguez and Imelda Padilla were absent from Friday’s vote.
City leaders said that a program to help low-income residents afford the fees will be expanded, also pointing out that the last trash fee increase was 17 years ago.
Without the fee hike, the general fund would lose about $200 million in the next budget year, since the city has been partly subsidizing trash pickup, according to city officials.
The fee increase is planned as the city faces a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall and the potential elimination of thousands of city jobs. Mayor Karen Bass is scheduled to release her proposed budget, and her plan for closing the financial gap, later this month.
Part of the shortfall is due to labor costs and recent pay increases for some workers, including for police officers and firefighters, that were approved by Bass and the council.
Faced with a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall, the Los Angeles City Council met behind closed doors to take a fresh look at its salary agreements with labor unions.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. on Friday blasted the trash fee hike and accused Bass and the City Council of mismanagement through overspending, “unaffordable” labor contracts and “policies that have driven businesses out of the city, resulting in lower business tax and sales tax revenue.”
“The mayor and City Council may want taxpayers to bail out Los Angeles, but it’s more likely that taxpayers will bail out of Los Angeles,” the association said.
Daniel M. Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, said property owners are “barely hanging on” as they face rising insurance costs and inflation.
“The city of Los Angeles will merely grasp at any money within reach at the detriment to taxpayers before looking at its own wasteful and bloated operations,” he said.
Several Bureau of Sanitation employees spoke in support of the fee at Friday’s City Council meeting.
Charles Leone, a coordinator with Service Employees International Union 721, which represents sanitation workers, told the council that the fee should have gone up “decades ago” and described the hard work that goes into picking up the trash.
“They took on the homeless crisis — head on, they take out the trash every single day, they lift up the mattresses every single day, they address the couches every single day, the list goes on and on,” he said.
The council last year raised sewer fees for all property owners. Landlords who own units that are rent-stabilized — the vast majority of units in the city — typically can’t pass on water costs, which are linked to sewer costs, to their tenants, according to city officials.
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