Trash talk on fees headed back to admin for number crunching

Part of Regina’s proposal for changes to garbage collection is headed back to administration for more tinkering.

Specifically, it has to do with a recommendation around homeowners paying a fee for how much trash they make, while property taxes would cover off recycling. That’s a reverse of how the city currently does things.

At Thursday’s public works and infrastructure meeting, it was decided that not enough is known about the proposal’s costs, and so it was sent back to city staff to do some further work around facts and figures.

“I’m not willing to vote for something unless I know how much it’s going to cost each resident,” said councillor Sharron Bryce.

“If we don’t have that information in front of us then we send it back to administration to get that information before we make those decisions.”

Bryce said they want to find out exactly how much garbage pickup will cost for each homeowner and have it billed the same way as recycling is billed.

A report prepared by administration didn’t contain that information, so a new report is scheduled to come back in October.

However, the committee did move forward on the recommendation of having winter garbage collection every other week.

But there’s one change.

“There were some families who thought we cannot do this with one bin every second week, so we actually an option that they can actually have two bins,” explained Bryce.

She said council will vote on that matter at its June 25 meeting.