The Camillus Village Board will meet at 10 a.m. Sunday at Village Hall, 37 Main St., Camillus, to discuss revisions to the village’s solid waste policy.
At the workshop meeting, the board will look at the village’s options for trash removal “and hopefully come up with a plan,” said Mayor Patricia Butler.
“There’s differences of opinion,” she said. “We have several different options that we’ve talked about and put on the table … but [we need] to put the pieces of the puzzle together and see if we can come up with a solution to benefit everybody.”
Currently, all village residents pay the same for trash pickup, regardless of how much trash they put out, Butler said.
“We have a couple commercial properties that have a lot of trash and have some needs, and is it fair to the regular taxpayer … to be paying equal to somebody who generates a lot of trash like a business, a restaurant or a gas station?” Butler said. “Everybody’s paying the same fee for the same service whether it’s one bag or 10 bags, or a small dumpster.”
She said a previous administration passed a resolution to address the inequity more than two years ago, but the changes were never implemented.
“In essence they were going to be charging people with commercial units as well as multiple dwelling residential units an increased fee for trash removal,” she said. There was even a line in the budget for the revenue, but no mechanism for collecting it, she said.
The mayor said she’s not sure implementing that resolution would be the best course of action.
“Let’s face it: a restaurant and a gas station may generate a lot more trash than a law office or a jewelry store,” she said. “It’s challenging, to say the least, to try to be fair and yet equitable to all businesses.”
“We have businesses in the village; I want them to stay here,” she added. “I don’t want to price them out of doing business here.”
