Mayor White's new tax to be called "waste reduction fee"
The Chronicle's Matt Stiles reports that the Mayor's new trash-tax-revenue-stream officially has the cute name required of all such stealth tax initiatives:
Nearly 500,000 Houston households getting city trash service would have to pay a $42 annual fee for the service, which is now free, under recommendations presented today to the City Council.
A task force appointed by Mayor Bill White to research solid waste policy and funding told the council that the city should, for the first time, charge a “waste reduction fee.”
Just one quick correction to the story: Trash service is not now "free" any more than police or fire service is now "free." Just because there is no direct fee attached to trash collection (or police or fire protection) does not mean they are "free."
To quote Slampo, who put this in terms that even tax-happy politicians should be able to understand:
[W]e’ve never been under the impression that garbage collection (light, heavy, recyclable or otherwise) is a city service that is supposed to pay for itself, anymore than police protection is supposed to be a self-sustaining service. Fact of the matter is, we always thought that municipalities were incorporated mainly to provide for sanitation and public safety....
Exactly.
Houstonians pay plenty in taxes for basic municipal services like sanitation and public safety.
If Mayor White thinks he needs to raise taxes to pay for those basic services (even though he has money to spend on other, not-so-basic priorities), then he needs to make that case to Houstonians.
But the notion that Houstonians are not currently paying for sanitation and public safety isn't true, no matter how many times the Mayor's staffers say it (or it gets repeated in the big newspaper).
UPDATE: Here's an excerpt from a longer story by Matt Stiles in today's Chronicle:
Houston households would pay a monthly $3.50 "waste reduction fee" and eventually would have their heavy trash picked up only twice a year, under a mayoral task force proposal presented Monday to the City Council.
Insisting the new charge — of $42 annually — was not a "garbage fee," task force members told the council that the levy on 450,000 households would increase conservation and boost efficiency in the city's solid-waste practices.
The fee, which would be new for Houston, would generate as much as $19 million that could be used to enhance recycling, launch new conservation efforts and pay for more enforcement of illegal dumping, according to the task force.
A new garbage tax is EXACTLY what is being proposed -- and we don't buy for a minute that it's going to finance any of the promised initiatives (which will likely be as illusory as the 50% increase in bus service METRO promised in the 2003 referendum).
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Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/03/07 07:45 AM | Print |
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