Pay as You Throw? Commercial fees?
Bar Harbor Workshop Begins Discussion
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Swan Agency Real Estate.
BAR HARBOR—In a Tuesday, March 4, workshop, the Bar Harbor Town Council continued to talk trash, hoping to “establish high-level public policy objectives for Bar Harbor’s waste management strategies.”
That’s a long way of saying that the town was looking at how much it costs to get rid of its trash, how to reduce the amount of waste is created in town—particularly food waste—and whether or not it can divert that food waste or other waste out of the trash stream.
“Let’s see if we can’t make something work for the community,” Town Manager James Smith said.
The workshop comes after consultant Thomas Henaghen program lead at Sevee and Mahar Engineers gave an assessment of the town’s transfer station and waste to the Bar Harbor Town Council, February 18.
In September 2024, Public Works Director Bethany Leavitt told councilors of Henaghen’s work. “This is the first step to move us in the right direction. We’ve got to study the problem and find the solutions.”
The town currently pays approximately $800,000 in just disposal costs for its waste. That number includes the tipping and hauling and surcharge fees. Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is the largest piece of the waste stream and cost.
The town is contracted with the Municipal Review Committee (MRC) until 2033, committed to bring its solid waste to the disposal facility. The cost for that is $85 a ton. The town has a contract that states it must send 5,056 tons of MSW to the disposal facility every year.
This means that the town paid approximately $590,000 for its solid waste and $205,000 for recyclables. That money comes from the budget, which is funded by property taxes.
MARCH 4 WORKSHOP
At the March 4 workshop, Council Chair Valerie Peacock said that whatever is done about Bar Harbor’s trash, it has to be a return on the town’s investment. It’s about waste reduction, but not at a cost increase, for her.
Vice Chair Maya Caines said that she was curious about what the goal was for the councilors: tax relief, waste reduction.
According to most of the sentiment amongst the councilors, the focus is on both and on exploring the options. In Bar Harbor currently, people and businesses bring their trash to the town’s transfer station. There is no direct fee. The services are paid for by property taxes. Both property-owning residents and businesses pay those taxes.
That could potentially change.
Options might include charging commercial haulers. They might include pay-per-throw. They might include having a separate food waste disposal or composting for free. They could include looking at digesters. There are many different kinds of digesters and uses, but digesters typically use a process where bacteria breaks down things like food waste or manure without using any oxygen. The process ends up creating something called biogas and digestate.
“This is not our first bite of the apple on this,” Councilor Matt Hochman said. Pay-as-you-throw was brought before the town in 2016, he said. “People hated it.”
At the time, the town had a task force that discussed pay-as-you-throw and charging commercial haulers. The council voted against a pay-as-you-throw program in early 2016. It then added looking into that and commercial hauling fees to the duties of the town’s recycling task force. That task force does not currently exist. It had been created in May 2016 after the council’s vote against pay-as-you-throw. Its last listed meeting on the town’s website’s agenda center is April 2018. Only one set of minutes is in that space.
There was a push to have commercial scales at the town’s transfer station, Hochman said and that discussion was tabled until August 2018.
“We haven’t discussed it since. It never came back to us,” Hochman said. “We wanted to charge commercial haulers back in 2016.”
That, he said, is the best way to start with trying to get relief for the tax payers.
“They are literally dumping on the taxpayer’s dime,” he said.
He has no problem with bag tags or stickers that differentiate between commercial and residential, but buying special bags will never pass.
“The pushback was extreme,” Hochman said.
At the time, pay-as-you-throw was considered too expensive, didn’t make enough of a difference to recycling and diversion efforts, and created trash shifting.
“We’re not in 2016. I think things have changed,” Peacock said. “Businesses are taxpayers, too.”
She said there could be a more equitable distribution of cost. There is also a climate emergency plan. That gives the town the perspective of reducing the carbon footprint, which is another layer to the trash conversation and issues.
An open landfill allows carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Burning trash also emits carbon dioxide.
“I think we have to think about a more user-based approach to this,” Peacock said. “We need to go slowly and get some education” about what the impact will be on individuals. How will the redistribution of cost impact individuals? Though taxpayers are paying for it in their taxes already, it doesn’t feel like they are when compared to the process of buying a bag or a tag that goes on a bag.
Caines was in favor of a pay-as-you-throw model. The biggest issue is to remove the barrier to entry for people, she said. The council should limit that as much as possible. She also said she thinks there are currently ways to recycle things in town not involving the town dump.
A user-based system is the best way to incentivize the reduction of trash.
Councilor Joe Minutolo said there’s definitely room for improvement about how the cost is divided. He suggested having a commercial hauler come and talk to the council.
“This is all new terrain for us,” Minutolo said.
Hochman said that they’ve had a commercial hauler come explain their process in the past. However, the only person still on the council is Hochman.
Smith said seasonal fluctuations and changes to the waste stream should be looked at as well. In the summer, a lot of bottles for redemption are going to the transfer station.
“It’s another small element, but it adds up,” he said.
How to address a cost shift during the seasonal influx that’s fair and equitable to all parties was important to discuss, Smith said.
Smith agreed with Caines and said that whatever changes occur there has to be an educational component and there’s an ease of use for taxpayers so that it’s not a cost shift but a cost reduction.
“In a lot of ways this is déjà vu all over again,” Hochman said, who stressed he was trying not to be cynical. “I’m hearing the exact same things we couldn’t move forward on years ago. I’m hoping we can get past that.”
Both Hochman and Caines live near the town’s transfer station off Ledgelawn Extension and Strawberry Hill, which both disclosed.
That site is challenging for a commercial scale model, Smith said. There isn’t good traffic flow on that site for a single scale.
There was also a quick discussion about partnering with the College of Atlantic and the Jackson Laboratory’s sustainability coordinator and the town’s task force on the climate emergency. Last year, that task force held a workshop with area businesses and others specifically about trash, recycling, and sustainability. According to its bylaws, the mission of the task force is “to define and recommend climate goals with the objective of drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and reducing community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by December 31, 2030.”
Hochman just wanted to make sure that whatever comes up as a plan, it’s followed through with.
“Let’s do it,” Peacock said.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Anaerobic digester information
Follow us on Facebook.
If you’d like to donate to help support us, you can, but no pressure! Just click here (about how you can give) or here (a direct link), which is the same as the button below.
If you’d like to sponsor the Bar Harbor Story, you can! Learn more here.
Waste management is a problem everywhere in the country, but nowhere as bad as it is in a small municipality with dozens of restaurants and hotels. Each produce dumpsters full of waste on a daily basis, almost all of which is the result of serving their guests and customers, the large majority of whom are not local taxpayers. Those entities should then be paying the town to handle their excessive quantities of waste of all types. Those businesses benefit from their non tax-paying clients and the tax payers of the town should not absorb the costs of their waste streams. I encourage the town to investigate managing that waste streams in lieu of considering charging taxpayers for their family refuse. Additionally, those same businesses, along with the many "tourists product" stores, regularly produce dumpsters full of empty packing boxes in which they received their products, food, beverages, etc. I have regularly witnessed local contractor's refuse trucks, first emptying the general refuse dumpsters into their compacting trucks, immediately followed by emptying the "cardboard only" dumpsters into the very same truck, along with the general refuse, and then dumping it all in the waste compactor at the recycling facility. How does this make sense to anyone? If our community waste stream is being overwhelmed with recyclable cardboard waste from these businesses, instead of that recyclable waste actually being baled and potentially recycled, where is the logic in that? This too should be addressed by those considering a methodology to reduce our waste stream, along with the costs associated with handling it.
"A user-based system is the best way to incentivize the reduction of trash."
That is a factual statement. How then to implement it? It's pretty simple.
Install scales for all commercial trash haulers. Weigh the vehicle before and after dumping. Charge accordingly. The trash haulers will pass the costs to their customers. The restaurants will pass the costs to their patrons as will the souvenir shops.
For town residents who haul their own trash to the transfer station, install multiple smaller scales. Don't issue special trash bags or tags; don't charge by the bag (which could be big or small or heavy with glass or other heavy materials); charge by the weight. Residents will either compost food scraps and separate out items that could/should be recycled to lessen their trash fees, or pay more for the convenience of not paying attention to composting, recycling, and separating out non-allowed materials.
Multiple smaller residential trash scales should be provided for residents to weigh their trash before their vehicles enter the transfer station's dumping areas to prevent queues. Residents should be charged at the scale. The town should decide how the fees should be collected. Onsite or paid monthly.
Recycling by residents should continue as is unless improvements are offered and can be incorporated.
Commercial haulers of large amounts of packaging materials, including cardboard, paper, inflatable air bags/tubes, etc. should be charged by volume load (i.e., 1 pickup truck load, x dollars; 1 dump truck load, xx dollars, etc.). Any person or business caught dumping large quantities of materials in the residential recycling bins should be fined heavily.
If there is some inconvenience to town residents created by weighing their trash before dumping it, it will be more than adequately compensated for by ending the subsidization of the large users of the transfer station.
It's long past time that a widow, or family of four residing on School St. or Ledgelawn Ave, who produce very little garbage, stop paying for the large quantities of garbage that the tourist industry produces.