Here’s why Belleville residents will see trash bills increase over the next few years

Mike Koziatek
·4 min read
1

Belleville residents will see a 10% increase in their trash, recycling and yard waste collection bill beginning May 1.

The new rate will be $22 per month, up from $20. The senior citizen rate for residents 65 and older will increase from $15 a month to $17.

Along with this $2 increase, the monthly fee will increase by 25 cents on May 1, 2025; 25 cents on May 1, 2026; and 25 cents on May 1, 2027, when the standard rate would be $22.75.

This is the city’s first increase in trash fees since 2017.

“These planned increases should allow us to keep up with increasing costs over those years,” Finance Director Jamie Maitret said in a memo to the Belleville City Council and elected officials.

The $2 monthly increase, or $24 a year, is expected to bring in an additional $340,000 in revenue, Maitret said in an interview.

After the City Council unanimously approved the new rates Tuesday night, Mayor Patty Gregory noted that Belleville’s rates are lower than the fees collected by private companies in other metro-east cities such as Collinsville, Swansea, Shiloh, Fairview Heights, Granite City and O’Fallon, according to the city’s analysis.

Belleville’s sanitation department collects trash and recyclable items weekly. Yard waste is collected weekly from March to mid-December and then once a month in January and February.

The other metro-east cities cited in the comparison study collect recyclable items on a bi-weekly basis.

Belleville residents pay their trash collection fee as part of a monthly bill that includes their sewer fee. For residents who don’t have automatic deductions, they get a blue postcard each month that shows their trash and sewer bill.

While the trash rate is going up, residents are scheduled to get a bit of relief on their sewer bills.

Due to work mandated by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, the City Council in 2013 voted to raise sewer bills 8% annually for 12 straight years. But that dozen-year run is scheduled to end on May 1, 2025. After that, the sewer rates are scheduled to increase 1% a year each May until the 2046-47 fiscal year.

Your sewer bill is based on the amount of water you use.

Why are trash fees going up?

Maitret told officials the city’s current trash fee structure was “no longer covering our costs.”

Here are the reasons she cited for the need to raise trash collections rates:

  • Significant increases in recycling expenses.

  • Increased landfill fees.

  • Annual increases in labor costs, including expense to get employees trained for commercial driver’s licenses.

  • Increases in property and liability insurance.

  • Significant increases in the costs of sanitation trucks.

  • Increased interest expense associated with financing the purchase of sanitation trucks.

Maitret said in an email that in 2017, when the city’s fees were last raised, the city paid about $10 per ton for a company to accept the city’s recyclable items. That cost is now about $100 per ton.

“This exact cost fluctuates monthly with the market, but it is consistently hovering around or above $100 per ton now,” she stated.

In comparison, the city pays a landfill $38.27 per ton of trash. When the city trash crews work on a Saturday, they use another landfill, where the cost is $45.71 per ton of trash.

These fees are scheduled to increase 50 cents per ton per year, Maitret said.

“Overall, the total cost for trash/recycling/yard waste fees in 2017 was about $620,000. We are projecting a total cost of about $825,000 for the next fiscal year’s budget,” she said. “This equates to about a 33% increase since the trash rates were last increased.”

Maitret said a new trash truck cost about $220,000 to $240,000 a few years ago but now costs about $325,000 and “financing rates are much higher.”

Most city employees, including those in the Sanitation Department, are scheduled to receive a 3% pay increase on May 1.

Overall, the city’s Sanitation Department’s current budget is about $3.55 million. It is included in the city’s General Fund, which pays for the day-to-day operations of the city and receives funding from several sources, including sales tax revenue.