Maybe this is the time it happens. Maybe not. Who can say?
For many residents, Houston’s unreliable garbage collection is a familiar issue — and it’s one that even the city’s newly elected mayor apparently must confront.
In his inaugural address Tuesday, Mayor John Whitmire said his garbage bin had languished at the curb for a week, a common service delay in the city. Residents logged more than 29,000 complaints for missed garbage pick-ups in 2023, the highest tally in at least a decade, according to the city’s 311 data.
“We’ve got to get reliable garbage picked up. Mine’s been in front of my house for a week. I thought surely, surely,” Whitmire said. “But that’s the reality. And we live in a great city. Great cities do not have those issues.”
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Solid Waste has long been underfunded, struggling to attract the number of drivers and maintain the number of trucks needed to reliably pick up garbage and recycling bins for its roughly 400,000 customers. Department leaders have said the department’s $100 million budget, far behind its Texas counterparts on a per household basis, is not enough to provide quality service.
Every other major Texas city charges residents a monthly garbage collection fee that provides sanitation workers with more resources. Houston does not, so Solid Waste must compete with other departments over property and sales tax dollars for funding in City Hall’s annual budget.
Former Mayor Sylvester Turner had said the city’s current system of funding was unsustainable. And the department’s long-range plan said it needs between $20 million and $40 million more to get on a better track.
“In my mind, it’s always being considered,” Solid Waste Director Mark Wilfalk said of a fee during last year’s budget deliberations. “I at least want to start working on the infrastructure for that because now we’re getting ready to change administrations, so I want to make sure everyone has the same level of information… We have to develop a more sustainable system.”
Whitmire has said he may explore implementing a garbage fee once he gets settled at City Hall and learns more about the state of the city’s finances. If it comes to that, though, he said it “would not be done without plenty of input from residents and City Council,” and the city would need to guarantee residents that the money would be used “as advertised.”
Mayor Whitmire has suggested that Solid Waste should be an “enterprise department”, which means that it would get its funding directly from a dedicated revenue source – the mythic garbage fee – rather than being funded from the general revenue budget. Public Works and the Houston Airport System are two existing enterprise departments. This would have the effect of improving the department’s performance and would also save a bunch of money from the general revenue budget, which as we all know is a thing that needs to happen. It all makes sense, but it has made sense for quite some time now without actually happening. What will we – and by “we” I mean Mayor Whitmire – do now? I have no idea. We’ll find out. I hope.
You want the service, you pay for the service.