Details of a new budget proposed by the City of Toronto include an additional fee for garbage collection in order to cover long-term landfill diversion plans. Though garbage collection is already paid by way of property taxes, this new fee is set to be an additional amount that the city hopes to acquire $54million from.

Nobody will be exempted from paying the additional fee, not even condo and apartment dwellers. Residents of single-family units (houses) will start paying a fee from November 1, amounting to about $62 per year on top of their property taxes. The city will also standardize the size of garbage bins: small, medium, large and extra large. All sizes aside from small will incur an additional charge. For example, a medium sized bin will add an extra $41 a year, large an extra $101, and $151 for extra large. These amounts will be confirmed in March 2008.
Residents of multi-dweller buildings have been scheduled to start paying approximately $46 per year on top of their property taxes beginning from July 1.

(Confused? Information on the plan on the City of Toronto website is available.)

The city plans to divert an additional 250,000 tonnes of garbage per year from landfill. Though it does make living in Toronto a little more expensive, could this be the city’s best effort to make things a little greener around here? Or, could it just be another cash grab by greedy politicians who would rather line their own pockets than actually improve Toronto as a whole? You be the judge.

Other additional costs to support the new budget include a $60-a-year vehicle registration levy for motorists, though it won’t appear until the fall.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Toronto Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.