Members of the Niagara Falls City Council are expected to hold a public hearing at an Oct. 22 meeting to hear pubic comments on the proposed yearly renewal of the city’s refuse and recycling fee.
Lawmakers will consider a resolution to set the hearing date at their Wednesday meeting this week.
City Controller Maria Brown is recommending that the fee be kept at its current levels of $181 for a single residential user tote and $225 for a single commercial user tote for the city’s 2026 fiscal year. The fee was first established in the 2019 city budget when city council members believed the Falls could save money by hiring a private contractor and eliminating refuse and recycling collection by the Department of Public Works.
Since then, the cost of the private contractor has increased almost every year.
Under the amendment to the City Charter that created the fee, the city controller is required every year to “make an estimate of user fees and probable revenues to be received” by the recycling and refuse program for both the current and upcoming city fiscal years. An estimate prepared by Brown shows projected 2025 user fee revenue of $3,985,452 and the exact same expected collections for 2026.
The estimate is based on an assumption of close to a 100% collection of the fee. User fee collections have, historically, been in the mid- to high-90th percentile.
Brown’s estimate also shows an expected recycling and refuse program cost of $4,823,328, under a contract with the city’s third-party provider, Casella Waste Management. That creates a gap of $837,876 between the revenue generated by the use fee and the cost of the recycling and refuse program.
To cover the difference between what is collected through the fee and the actual cost of the recycling and refuse program, the city has previously used an allocation from its general fund to fill the gap.
Mayor Robert Restaino has previously noted that there “has always been a contribution from the general fund (to cover the recycling and refuse program cost).”
If the user fee remains at its current levels, it will cover only 82.6% of the refuse and recycling program cost. The council could need to increase the fee by 17% to eliminate the deficit.
A 17% increase would set the fee at $212.
When the fee was first established, then-Mayor Paul Dyster had proposed a $218-per-year solid waste disposal fee. However, the city council cut the fee to $181 a year or just over $15 a month.
By law, the fee cannot be increased by more than 3.5% per year. Eliminating the fee would create a more than $4.2 million budget gap for the city in 2025.
The fee, which is billed directly to property owners, has never been raised. It has, as required by law, been reauthorized every year as part of the city’s budget approval process.