Memphis City Council members raised the city's solid waste fee and gave the green light to a raise in Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division rates at the last council meeting of the year Tuesday, Dec. 17.

The council session was the last for six of the 13 current council members, and it left a relatively clean slate for the new council that takes office next month.

The new council's to-do list will include resolving what to do about electric rates for MLGW customers since the council Tuesday rejected that proposal while approving rate hikes for gas and water.

The plan proposed by MLGW called for the average residential monthly bill to rise by $4.33 a month on water and 74 cents more for gas over a three-year period. The electric rate, if approved, would have risen about $9 a month.

The council can only vote a MLGW proposal up or down. It will be up to the utility board to come back with a proposal for electric rates that will come to the new council.

Council chairman Kemp Conrad proposed delaying the electric rate increase request at least through 2020 until the utility begins infrastructure upgrades as a show of good faith. The rate hikes wouldn't have taken effect until July at the earliest. He withdrew the proposal after MLGW balked. He then brought it back up for a vote but saw it voted down on a 6-6 tie vote.

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The idea could still be considered by the utility board. It also called for the utility to come up with $9.2 million more in savings for next year, above the more than $90 million in savings the utility projected for its original five-year plan.

The rate increases across three years were part of the five-year plan for the $1 billion infrastructure upgrade. But Conrad argued that the upgrade could begin before rate hikes and should have done so years ago.

"The council does not have confidence in the competence of MLGW to get this thing done," he said, acknowledging Young has been at the helm of the publicly owned utility for only two years.

"This would put it back on you, not on us," Conrad said. "All of this stuff should have happened a long time ago. I think Memphians have waited long enough."

Young said without the complete rate hike package, the utility couldn't cut its workforce by 13% over several years through attrition as planned and might have to resort to layoffs as one of several options.

"You can't have it both ways. Something's got to give," Conrad said, citing public sentiment. "They don't think you get the job done."

The decisions mark the third consecutive year that the council has rejected a multi-year rate hike in water, gas and electric by MLGW for infrastructure improvements. The 2017 and 2018 proposals resulted in MLGW coming back with lower one year proposals that the council then approved.

Meanwhile, the council Tuesday took back its rejection of the solid waste fee hike two weeks ago with a move to reconsider the earlier vote.

The reconsideration came after Mayor Jim Strickland said that without the $7.16 monthly increase starting next month, he would lay off 199 full-time sanitation workers, drop any curbside pickup of garbage not in containers and reduce collections of recyclables in the bins to once a month.

"This is extortion," council member Joe Brown said before voting for the rate hike to a monthly fee of $29.96. "You didn't have to go there."

The rate hike passed on an 11-2 vote with council members Reid Hedgepeth and Cheyenne Johnson voting no.