{"id":3744,"date":"2013-06-01T11:27:41","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T15:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=3744"},"modified":"2013-06-01T11:32:22","modified_gmt":"2013-06-01T15:32:22","slug":"vdt-should-dig-deeper-into-county-trash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/06\/vdt-should-dig-deeper-into-county-trash.html","title":{"rendered":"VDT should dig deeper into county trash"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe VDT should dig deeper into the finances of Lowndes County trash collection.\r\nNobody has ever seen an accounting of where where the money went for\r\nthe county’s former waste collection sites, so nobody knows whether\r\nthe county was really losing money or how much, and the county’s\r\nversion of how those sites had to be paid for doesn’t match state law..\r\nSure, Bill Slaughter defending a decision made when Ashley Paulk was chair\r\nis amusing, but instead of transcribing what county officials tell it,\r\nthe VDT could find lots more under the county’s garbage with a little digging.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nJason Schaefer write for the VDT Thursday,\r\n\r\nConcerns continue over garbage agreement:\r\nBusiness owner argues case against County<\/a>\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe County is not required under Georgia law to issue RFPs to any\r\ncompany for waste disposal services, according to Slaughter. That\r\ndecision was made in a good-faith effort to find the lowest possible\r\nrate for garbage service for the citizens of Lowndes County, he said\r\nTuesday.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\nIs that the point of county government, to act like Wal-Mart?\r\nIs money the only value the county government can name?\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nEveryone I talked to about the trash issue in 2012 who already\r\nhad a waste collection card said they’d be willing to pay more\r\nto keep the sites open.\r\nMaybe if the county had held public hearings they would have learned that.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nAnd does anyone believe ADS’s rates are going to stay that low?\r\nLook at\r\n\r\nWakulla, Florida, where it’s $196\/year<\/a>.\r\nBut the bigger question is why did the county privatize trash collection\r\nanyway?\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\nThe County was hemorrhaging between $400,000 and $600,000 per year\r\nto keep its recycling centers open and operate the equipment to haul\r\nthe garbage, but the money lost did not come out of property tax\r\nmoney.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nWe don’t know how much the county was losing (if anything),\r\nbecause the county never provided an accounting of what they\r\nwere spending on the waste collection centers.\r\nBut what figures they did publish were rapidly decreasing:\r\n$400,000 is the final figure County Manager Joe Pritchard gave\r\n\r\n9 October 2012<\/a> in the meeting when they voted to abolish the\r\ncollection centers and award a monopoly to Veolia, excuse me,\r\n\r\nADS,\r\nowned by investors in New York City<\/a>.\r\nA decision on an essentially rural matter was made by three urban Commissioners without any public hearing on their current RFP.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nAs for the details of collection center expenses, Pritchard said:\r\n

\r\nThe revenue projections are a little bit complicated. \r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\nCommissioner Richard Raines told Gretchen Quarterman 9 October 2012<\/a>\r\nthe cost in that graph was only the tipping fees and not all the ancilary costs of waste disposal (dumpsters, truck maintenance, fencing repairs, etc.).\r\nThe county never published a detailed accounting nor\r\nany detailed revenue projections.\r\nThe county\r\n\r\ncan’t even produce a list of the 5,000 people who bought waste\r\ncollection cards<\/a>.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nAnd why did the money not come out of property taxes?\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“That was paid for out of other incorporated revenues slated\r\nto go to services,” County Clerk Paige Dukes said.\r\n“Things like other licenses and fees like occupational taxes,\r\nalcohol license fees and other permits.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nProperty taxes do not go to Advanced Disposal now, nor have they\r\never gone to solid waste disposal services. Georgia law prevents\r\nCounty governments from using property tax dollars to pay for waste\r\nservices.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nGeorgia law actually says, since\r\n\r\nHB 489 of 1999<\/a> modified Georgia code to add in 36-70-24:\r\n

\r\n

\r\n(3)(A) The strategy shall ensure that the cost of any\r\nservice which a county provides primarily for the\r\nbenefit of the unincorporated area of the county shall\r\nbe borne by the unincorporated area residents,\r\nindividuals, and property owners who receive the\r\nservice. Further, when the county and one or more\r\nmunicipalities jointly fund a county-wide service, the\r\ncounty share of such funding shall be borne by the\r\nunincorporated residents, individuals, and property\r\nowners that receive the service.\r\n

\r\n(B) Such funding shall be derived from special service\r\ndistricts created by the county in which property\r\ntaxes, insurance premium taxes, assessments, or user\r\nfees are levied or imposed or through such other\r\nmechanism agreed upon by the affected parties which\r\nwith the intent of subparagraph (A) of this paragraph; \r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nGeorgia law explicitly says counties can<\/em> use property\r\ntax dollars to pay for services in the unincorporated parts of a county.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nDukes continued:\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“Residential solid waste in unincorporated Lowndes County has\r\nto be paid for by user fees,” Dukes explained. “There\r\nwere never tax dollars spent on solid waste management. That’s one\r\nof the common misconceptions.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nThe County Clerk only mentioned user fees, yet HB 489\r\nlists other options: “property taxes, insurance premium taxes, assessments”.\r\nThat bill also says “Such funding shall be derived from special service\r\ndistricts created by the county”.\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe county has no excuse for not knowing that, since the\r\nAssociation of County Commissioners spells it out in its\r\n\r\nIntroduction to the Service Delivery Strategy Act for Local Governments<\/a>:\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThe intent of this provision is to eliminate double taxation of municipal\r\nproperty owners. When a county provides a service primarily for the\r\nbenefit of the unincorporated area, the law provides that funding for\r\nsuch service must come from:\r\n
    \r\n
  1. \r\nspecial service districts created by the county in which property\r\ntaxes, insurance premiums taxes, assessments or user fees are levied or\r\nimposed; or\r\n
  2. \r\nany other mechanism agreed upon by the affected parties which eliminates\r\ndouble taxation.\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nLowndes County passes special tax lighting districts all the time for subdivisions:\r\nfour of them on one day,\r\n\r\n11 December 2012<\/a>, the same day the Commission passed the final approval for\r\n\r\nthe solid waste ordinance that abolished the collection centers<\/a>\r\nand\r\n\r\ngranted a monopoly to ADS<\/a>.\r\nChairman Paulk had to be reminded those were supposed to be public hearings,\r\nbut at least the county did hold public hearings for those special tax lighting\r\ndistricts, which is more than the county did for waste collection.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

    \r\n<\/a>\r\nThe county could just as easily pass a\r\n\r\nspecial tax district for waste disposal<\/a>.\r\nYet nobody in the county government, no elected official\r\nand no employee, ever deigned to even discuss that option.\r\n\r\nAnd now the county is\r\n\r\nwasting taxpayer money suing Deep South Sanitation<\/a>,\r\na local business to which the county gave a license.\r\nHow does that even satisfy Chairman Slaughter’s only named value of\r\nsaving money for the citizens of the county?\r\n<\/p>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nDig deeper, VDT, and who knows what rats you may find hiding under\r\nthe garbage in Lowndes County?\r\nWe already know that the local landfill\r\n\r\naccepts coal ash<\/a>.\r\nWhat else are our elected officials and the landfill operator\r\naccepting in the name of money?\r\n<\/p>\r\n

    \r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The VDT should dig deeper into the finances of Lowndes County trash collection. Nobody has ever seen an accounting of where where the money went for the county’s former waste collection sites, so nobody knows whether the county was really losing money or how much, and the county’s version of how those sites had to […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[216,14,70,8,2,19,20,88,478,479,133],"tags":[1339,619,679,258,8753,2406,773,8704,8728,713,1431,8701,8699,6351,8709,3240,8702,154,8710,12,7,8734,805,2791,656,5232,8772,2516,60,8773,6,4552,8742],"class_list":["post-3744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal","category-economy","category-ethics","category-georgia","category-government","category-history","category-law","category-lowndes-county-commission","category-solid-waste","category-trash","category-vdt","tag-accounting","tag-ads","tag-ashley-paulk","tag-bill-slaughter","tag-coal","tag-coal-ash","tag-deep-south-sanitation","tag-economy","tag-ethics","tag-financing","tag-garbage","tag-georgia","tag-government","tag-highbeam-capital","tag-history","tag-investigation","tag-lake","tag-landfill","tag-law","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-lowndes-county-commission","tag-money","tag-new-york-city","tag-paige-dukes","tag-reporting","tag-solid-waste","tag-special-tax-lighting-district","tag-tax","tag-trash","tag-valdosta","tag-values","tag-vdt"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-Yo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3744"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3750,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions\/3750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}