TRASHED: City scrambles as citizens put ordinance on ice

With the city’s plan to tie garbage fees to property taxes trashed due to a citizen petition, city leaders are scrambling to come up with viable options to collect resident’s Waste Management bills.

“From our perspective, we are thinking of alternative billing procedures,” acting City Manager Ken Gallander told The Log Monday. “Per our agreement with Waste Management, we are required to address the billing and collecting.”

The ordinance, which placed residents’ trash bills on their property taxes was effectively suspended and unenforceable as of Aug. 18 when the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections verified that Destin resident Teresa Abraham and her group of volunteers had collected the 970 signatures required to push the petition forward and suspend the ordinance.

Per the city’s charter, Abraham was required to have the petition signed by 10 percent of eligible voters. All told, the group of concerned citizens collected 1,526 signatures, or about 15 percent.

Given the latest turn of events, Gallander said the city has “reached out” to Waste Management to see what options might be available to them for billing and collection.

One idea was to utilize Destin Water Users (DWU) as a billing and collection provider, but Gallander said that’s not likely as the utility’s legal advisor said they were not able to collect for the city based on their by-laws.

Destin Water Users General Manager Richard Griswald denied Gallander’s account of the situation.

“We have not been approached by the city with this issue,” Griswald told The Log. “We had one short phone call about six to eight months ago… that was a follow-up on another issue though.”

“We are a water company, we don’t have any business in garbage,” Griswald added.

If the city cannot find an outside firm to do the billing and collection for them, Gallander said they would more than likely have to hire someone to come in and run the program, which would add the additional expenses of salary, benefits and costs associated with starting the program up and purchasing necessary equipment and software.

 “As we are looking at this, there are going to be costs associated,” Gallander said. “That was kind of the beauty of the non-ad valorem method, we would use existing procedures without the added personnel.”

As of Monday, Gallander wasn’t prepared to throw any projected costs on the table for a city-run billing program, but he did say there would be increased cost associated with sending out and collecting bills for 5,300 residential cart customers on a quarterly basis.

Some of the discounts residents would have enjoyed under the non-ad valorem collection method might also be in jeopardy. Gallander said they could “go away” if the city had to alter the billing system and if Waste Management had to assume the responsibility.

“We would love to maintain as many discounts as possible, but since we have to start from scratch, those discounts and such are on the table… they are going to have to be significantly evaluated,” he said.

With more questions than answers right now, city leaders must first decide whether or not they are going to repeal the ordinance when they meet again for the next regular city council meeting Sept. 6. At that point, City Attorney Jerry Miller will have the necessary paperwork on hand, if city leaders choose to repeal the ordinance.

If they choose not to repeal the ordinance, Destin’s residents will have the final say on the matter as part of a citizen vote. According to the city’s charter, “the vote of the electors on a proposed or referred ordinance shall be held not less than 30 days nor more than 60 days from the date that the council rejected the proposed ordinance or refused to reconsider the referred ordinance.”

The city would be required to hold a special election, which also has costs associated, since no election is currently scheduled in the 30 to 60 day window. If voted down, the ordinance would officially be repealed once the election results were certified.

“I hope they repeal it,” Abraham said of the city’s choice. “The residents of Destin have spoken and are clearly not in favor of this.”