City Council to hear proposed solid waste fee hike, weighs 2024 ballot questions
A sanitation worker hauls a garbage can to his truck in the Midtown neighborhood of Evergreen in January 2020. (Patrick Lantrip/The Daily Memphian file)
The monthly city solid waste fee for residential properties would rise 37% — from $29.96 to $41.05 — under a proposal that Mayor Jim Strickland’s administration takes to the Tuesday, Nov. 7, Memphis City Council committee sessions.
The $11.09 increase, which would show up on monthly utility bills, will be discussed at a 9:15 a.m. meeting.
Watch a live stream of the entire day at City Hall. Here is the agenda for the committee sessions. Here is the agenda for the afternoon council meeting. You can find documents for some of the items here. Follow @bdriesdm for live coverage of the council’s day.
The ordinance is not on the full council’s Tuesday afternoon meeting agenda for a first “reading,” or vote, but it could be added unless at least two council members object.
If approved, it would be the second solid waste fee hike in four years following years of turmoil around, changes to and persistent complaints about the city’s garbage pickup.
The council hears the proposal with four meetings left in its current four-year term.
A new council with at least five new members takes office in January.
The timing for Strickland’s proposal comes as he also prepares to leave office at the end of 2023.
Four years ago at about this time, as the current council was preparing to take office and Strickland was about to start his second term, he took a 31.4% solid waste fee hike — from $22.80 to the current $29.96 — to a reluctant council also weighing Memphis Light, Gas and Water rate hikes.
The council, at its next-to-last meeting of 2019, voted down the fee hike on a 6-6 tie vote.
Strickland gave the council an ultimatum to raise the solid waste fee or he would immediately make personnel and service cuts in the solid waste division.
The council reconsidered and approved the solid waste fee hike and voted down the MLGW rate hikes. The new council would ultimately approve the MLGW fees as one of its first acts in 2020.
The solid waste fee increase funded wholesale changes in solid waste including making the city service its own division and the intent to meet collection dates in neighborhoods.
The current council’s four-year term has been pockmarked by waves of complaints about missed pickup days and council members saying the city’s condition reflects a need for better solid waste services.
Council members also take final votes Tuesday on a pair of city charter change referendums that voters would decide on in August 2024.
The referendums up Tuesday for third and final votes are:
- An ordinance allowing partisan primaries in advance of October city elections.
- An ordinance to return a runoff provision to the city charter for all city offices.
Council members JB Smiley Jr. and Chase Carlisle said last month they want the council to approve one or the other ballot question — but not both.
They cite the need to narrow the field of candidates — especially in the race for mayor — and see a winner who gets a majority, not a plurality, of the votes cast.
Mayor-elect Paul Young won the mayor’s race in October at the top of a 17-candidate field.
Memphis City Council member Martavius Jones said if voters approve the runoff provision to the city charter, a federal court would likely have to review the referendum’s outcome. (Patrick Lantrip/The Daily Memphian)
His 24,420 votes — or 27.6% of the votes cast in the low turnout of 88,337 — was the lowest total for a winning mayoral candidate in the 55-year history of the mayor-council form of government.
The city’s charter originally required separate runoff elections for all city offices where no candidate got a majority.
The runoff provision was declared unconstitutional for the mayor’s race in a 1991 ruling that held the 1966 charter — specifically with its runoff requirement — was written with the intent of making it difficult for a Black candidate to win any citywide office.
At the time, the city’s population was majority white.
The runoff provision remains intact for the seven single-member district seats on the city council.
Council chairman Martavius Jones has said if voters approve fully restoring the runoff provision to the city charter, a federal court would likely have to at least review the referendum’s outcome.
Council members discuss the competing ballot questions at a 10:15 a.m. committee session and decide then on whether to go through with a final vote on one or the other at the full council’s afternoon meeting.
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Memphis City Council Solid Waste Fee city runoff provision city partisan primariesBill Dries on demand
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Bill Dries
Bill Dries covers city and county government and politics. He is a native Memphian and has been a reporter for almost 50 years covering a wide variety of stories from the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1978 police and fire strikes to numerous political campaigns, every county mayor and every Memphis Mayor starting with Wyeth Chandler.
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