January 14, 2009
Dear Mayor Daley:
According to something I read in the paper recently, the City of Chicago has passed a new ordinance requiring all garbage dumpsters to be licensed by the City for a fee, which will be based on the cubic yardage of the dumpster. As the treasurer of an 18-unit housing cooperative, I am concerned about the impact this new ordinance will have on our business. We operate on a small budget and an even smaller margin, so any new expense is noticeable.
I spoke to a representative of our disposal company this afternoon, and he confirmed that any license fee paid by the company to the city would be passed along to their customers. While $180 per year for the dumpster we use does not seem like much, it amounts to almost a 10% increase in our disposal costs, which comes on top of the increases we have seen this year caused by the high price of diesel fuel. Of course, any increase in expenses we have to cover comes directly out of the pockets of our members, who are self-employed people, senior citizens, and working families.
The other objection I have to this new license fee is that it is intended to pay for keeping the alley clean. Perhaps there are some neighborhoods where the city cleans the alleys, but I have never seen a city worker cleaning our alley in the seven years I have lived in this building. Either a private hauler takes away the trash or else it remains there. In addition, our dumpster is kept on our private property, not in the city alley. We are responsible for keeping the area around the dumpster clean, not the city. The new fee does not provide us any services.
There is a second issue related to disposal that has been proposed by the City, to which I also object. This is the proposal to franchise waste hauling in Chicago. As I understand it, under this proposal, the City would be divided into a number of zones and private haulers would bid for the right to be the exclusive disposal company in that zone. No business would have the right to contract with any other disposal company for hauling services for a term of seven years.
There may be some good to come from a system such as this one. For instance, more efficient trucking routes might result in fewer greenhouse gas emissions. I believe, however, that there are other ways to achieve the same results without removing the competitive environment for hauling services that we have now. A little over a year ago, our co-op took competitive bids for disposal services from four different hauling companies. By changing suppliers, we managed to cut our disposal costs by almost two-thirds, resulting in significant savings to the building. At the same time, we improved the recycling services available to our members. I put a lot of time into overseeing this process and I think I can say that we have been uniformly happy with the results. I am not at all pleased with the prospect of losing either the savings or the improved services as a result of a franchise system. Having seen the services available via our bidding process, I do not believe that we could do better than what we have right now. The best we could hope for under the franchise system would be to retain our current disposal company, which is, at best, a crapshoot.
I urge you to drop the franchise idea. I do not believe it would benefit small businesses in Chicago. I also add my voice to the chorus of disapproval for the new dumpster license fee.
Sincerely,
Lisa G.
Chicago, IL
Letters to Public Officials 