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Mid Hudson Times, Wednesday, July 24, 2019
City’s garbage fees prompt cry of foul
Continued from page 3
years.”
According to Comptroller Venning during the Work
Session, the City has no control over these fees that will
raise the cost to do the sanitation. He said that some of
the fee accounts for tipping and tonnage, along with other
operational costs that the sanitation fund has incurred.
DPW Superintendent Garrison reported that back in
October of 2018, the city had received a bill which showed
that tipping fees went from 85 dollars to 104 dollars a ton,
which affected the budget between three to four hundred
thousand dollars. “We have no control over that,” he said
to the council.
The sanitation fund has continuously run deficits for
multiple years since 2015. In order to regain a positive
balance, Comptroller Venning proposed that these user
fee increases would “bring the sanitation fund back into
solvency, allowing it to be self-supporting again, and also
support[ing] its future capital needs.”
“This isn’t really a sort of ‘if you want to do this,’”
said Comptroller Venning as he closed his presentation.
“There’s a structural imbalance, and this must happen.”
The council unanimously voted to increase the
sanitation fees at its April 8 Council Meeting, four days
after the Work Session.
Former Councilwoman Christine Bello, who is running
for City Council At-Large in November, was blindsided
by the increases. She believes that there should have been
a public hearing, so residents could have expressed their
frustrations. A City of Newburgh resident and business
owner, Bello predicts that this will be calamitous for
many, particularly seniors, who will most likely have to
sacrifice money from their food budgets to now pay for
their sanitation bills.
“[T]hese rate increases are clearly not pocket change.
We have city council representatives that are supposed to
be our voice on the council yet no one on the council asked
how the people here would manage; most especially our
seniors,” she said. “Beyond that, while a public hearing
is not technically required because this is an amendment
to an existing policy, there was nothing to stop any one of
them from demanding one. [T]his was a 55% increase in
sanitation fees and no one thought to ask the people who
would foot the bill what they had to say about it... The
lack of oversight and mismanagement [is] breathtaking!”
Mayor Torrance Harvey explained that the city
council had difficult decisions to make at the end of
last year. The City of Newburgh was “challenged with
Executive Resignations during budget season” along
with “an absentee City Manager, a Comptroller who
was not completely competent after replacing a former
comptroller who was convicted for stealing, and a city
planner who also resigned for personal reasons all during
budget season” toward the end of 2018.
After the city council received the City Manager[‘s]
proposed budget for 2019 that had “tax increases in
double figures,” Mayor Harvey said that the council
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quickly worked to approve a financial consultant “during
these unstable transitions.” He pointed out that the city
council managed to close the 2% tax cap before approving
the 2019 budget.
“Since then, we’ve hired a new City Manager and a new
comptroller,” said Harvey. He makes this clear: “there
are some items in [the City’s] transition that had to be
corrected and cleaned up.”
Homeowners and businesses are not the only ones to
be negatively affected by the sanitation bill increases.
Landlords are adversely affected as well.
Michael Acevedo, President of the Orange County
Landlords Association, has never seen increases to
sanitation bills like this one. He believes that homeowners
are not being looked out for. “There’s a woman who lives
in a two family house, and she just told me that she just
can’t afford to pay the bill. I told her [that] if you don’t
pay the bill, it’s going to increase, they’re going to charge
you ten percent increase, and they’re going to take your
house if you don’t pay it,” he said.
Acevedo predicts that landlords who own properties
in the City of Newburgh might be forced to absorb these
costs. After New York State passed rent protections for
tenants last month, landlords “can’t turn around and
pass these bills onto the tenants, because you’re only
allowed to raise their rent five percent,” he said.
Acevedo explained that if he charges $1000 of monthly
rent for a single family home, and ends up raising his rent
by 5%, he is only allowed to charge tenants an extra 50
dollars a month. With the new sanitation bill for a single
family home at $179 per quarter, landlords would need to
pay an annual fee of $116 out of their own pockets for that
property, that is not offset by rent.
“I know every time our fees are increased, taxpayers
[do] feel like they are being taxed to the limit,” said City
Councilwoman Romona Monteverde. “It’s really difficult
coming in-- this is my second year-- and trying to undo
many, many years of mismanagement.” Councilwoman
Monteverde believes that if sanitation bills began to
increase in 2012 at “5% or even 3%, we wouldn’t be in this
predicament today.”
Monteverde explained that the previous administration
should have incrementally increased sanitation bills,
beginning in 2012. “This big increase would not have hurt
so much,” she said. “In order to increase the capacity in
sanitation, DPW unfortunately can’t hold off any longer.
We did not want to do this. We knew it was going to be
painful. But, in order to be fiscally responsible, we had
to do this.”
City Council was forced to increase the fees, as they
had not been increased in seven years. “I know that’s
not what people want to hear, and in a way it is unfair
because of the previous administration. They should
have been doing these previous increases. I can tell you
that we are trying to look into ways that would work for
the city and decrease the fees at some point, but we’re just
starting to think about that,” she said.
While it’s reported that 22% of this increase will go
toward the increase of the Orange County tipping fee, it
is not known where the remaining 33% will exactly go.
Comptroller Venning and DPW Superintendent George
Garrison did not respond to immediate requests for
comment.