12-11-17 Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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REGULAR MEETING December 11, 2017 staff. Three (3) are in the office and the other three (3) are in the Household Hazardous Waste Program. We also have two (2)part-time staff members. One (1)works twenty (20)hours a week both in the office and the HHW Program and the other only works on Saturdays to help out the HHW. Saturday tends to be our busiest day of the week. Mr. Przybysz continued, Our funding comes from program fees charged to residents in our curbside program as well as tipping fees, which we receive $2 per ton from Prairie View Landfill for every month to offset recycling costs. That is a common practice in the State to fund Districts. That annual tipping fee revenue can fluctuate drastically. It could be under$550,000 to over$700,000 per year. That has only happened a couple times in twenty-seven (27) years so we don't count on that. We generally use the $500,000 mark for the purpose of figuring our annual budget request. 2017 was a year of major changes for the district. Starting about five (5) years ago we began to think about moving our HHW and office into one (1) location. The HHW Program had been on East 5t" Street in Mishawaka and our office would always be a rented space somewhere around South Bend. We started to brainstorm if we could build or buy something as we were completely out of space in Mishawka. At the second Board meeting I had ever had as Director, I was told we would have to raise fees around the year 2016. Things changed and we were able to make it through without rate changes until this year. The thirteen(13) years I've been associated with the District,the discussion has occurred regarding the addition of our fees to the tax bill as a cost saving measure. As it turns out after all of these years of discussion, each and every one (1) of these major changes took place at the same time at the start of this year. First,the fee increase. In the past, County residents paid $2.70 per month or$32.40 annually. The City of South Bend residents paid $1.97 per month on their water bill, of which the District would receive $1.76. The City added a processing fee of$0.21 per household, per month. Starting in 2003, I discovered when I became the Director,the District was paying more to the vendor for the curbside program than the $1.76 per household, per month. In other words, other revenue sources were covering the cost of South Bend households. In 2015, our Board chose to continue using down our reserve which at the time was healthy, before addressing the fee increase. This was enough to get us through another year for 2016. It was then determined that going forward, all residents would pay an equal amount which was determined to be$3.33 per month, per household. That includes curbside, HHW, and administrative costs. Mr. Przybysz continued, There was also a debate regarding an HHW fee to all residential households in the County since all residential households in the County are eligible to use the program. There was a lot of conversation about that. After a great deal of conversation, the decision to charge such a fee was postponed. The subject will be brought up in our January 2018 Board Meeting in order to consider it moving forward. Placing the fee on the tax bill saved the District roughly $80,000 a year in printing and postage to bill all the County residents twice per year. We also had staff spending the majority of their time trying to track down non-payments which was a very high rate when we were just billing straight. We are not the first District to collect fees in such a manner. Other Districts have been doing the same for years so we didn't create this wheel, we actually copied what others were doing. The question then came up about whether someone could lose their home to tax sale if they do not pay the recycling fees. Attorney opinions say no and that the law does not allow a tax sale for unpaid recycling fees. Our only recourse to collect fees owed would be small claims court which is what we have always done in the past. I met with County Treasurer Mike Kruk and Lao Associates who handle the tax software. The result is that the recycling fees have been unflagged as a trigger of a tax sale. It is not a trigger for a tax sale. Also, we made sure that there will be no money posted to the line- item on the tax bill for Solid Waste Management District Recycling Fees until all other fees are paid first. That way, there is no back door way of getting money while other things are short. The District purchased a building at 828 Kerr Street in South Bend which we closed on in February 2017. Our offices moved in in March 2017 and our HHW Program moved and officially opened there on November 6, 2017. It should be noted that the majority of work needed to be done for the building to become fully operational was performed by our staff which saved $25,000- $30,000 in fees to have other people run phone and Ethernet lines. That took about a month. Mr. Przybysz continued, There have been comments made that suggest the program fees went up because we bought the building. In fact, our mortgage and utilities payments so far have run under or just about equal to what our combined rent payments had been in the past. This move 7