In prior segments of this series, I’ve hinted that the new “heavy trash pickup fee” (which we should really be calling the “garbage service tax”) may be impossible to administer fairly. Today, I’ll discuss why, but be warned–there’s a lot of parenthetical comments coming because there are so many interrelated side issues, it’s not funny. Well that, and Office Depot had a sale on punctuation marks.

As with most such garbage programs, the proposal in Houston is to add a flat fee to “everyone’s” water bills, regardless of whether they actually use the heavy trash or recycling services. The problem is, that oft-quoted “30% of users” figure refers to garbage service users. It doesn’t refer to utility service users, and there is a difference between the two groups. It’s especially stark here in Houston, because we have gone on for so long with the two services completely separate. This isn’t just a financial issue; it’s built into the very infrastructure of both Departments, and even subtly, our ordinances. I’m not talking about things like authorization for the fee; I’m talking about problems with implementing it.

Some of the issues won’t go away, no matter how hard the Mayor, Council, and even the bureaucracy try to deal with them. The first obvious problem is that there can be a need for heavy trash pickup without a pre-existing utility account to bill. Someone who is renovating a home or small business (or converting one to the other) isn’t necessarily going to need a utility account during that phase. In some cases there’s been no utility service at the site for so long, there’s not even an account. How do you bill a vacant lot, or one that has no water service? What happens if a citizen wants to have heavy trash picked up — but there’s no service account at the address? What if there is an account, but they don’t want water service, they just want heavy trash to be picked up? Do they have to get a water account for one month, just so they can get heavy trash service? (We’ll ignore how unlikely it is that someone scheduled their cleanup for just before the twice-yearly pickup.)

Next, the plan does not take into account whether the properties in question are single or multi-family–under the definitions used by Public Works, which are not the same as those used by Solid Waste. It does make a difference. Under PW&E ordinances, any separate living arrangements served by a single meter are classified as multi-family. This includes large apartment complexes, garage apartments, two separate homes on one lot (common in some 80-year old inner loop neighborhoods), duplexes, triplexes, quad-plexes, etc. Therefore, there can be two, three, or even four families living at, say, 3999 Public Street, Units A, B, C, & D, but they would receive only ONE $3.50 charge — because there’s only one water account!

Oh wait, did I say “even four” families? Dare I mention that the same thing applies to apartment complexes with several hundred units? Potentially the same fee, but just once for all the living units. Should Public Works multiply it by the number of units? Well, most apartments don’t even get city trash service. (Provided to apartments with 8 or less units, only.) But if it consoles you, they won’t all get a huge break. Some of them may have to pay the fee 2, 3, 4, even six times. You see, owing to pressure, main line size/location, and builder choice, an apartment complex may have one meter, or it may have a half-dozen or more. I’m sure the owner of a ten unit apartment complex with two meters is going to be overjoyed to pay twice the fee of a sixty unit complex with one meter.

I should also mention that utility accounts for multi-family properties have to be in the owner’s name because of Texas law. So there can be two houses on the same lot, different families, different garbage pickups, but the landlord has to pay the fee along with the water utilities — assuming he hasn’t stuck one of the tenants with the bill. (All too many shady landlords tell one of the tenants to put it in their name — and tenants either don’t know better, or do it so the landlord won’t evict them.) I also wonder how the two-house or garage apartment situations are going to square with the “townhome street frontage rule.” (I’ve only glanced at it so far.) I suspect more than just some modern townhomes are going to lose service. It’s all fine and dandy to make a rule based on modern construction practices, but some thought has to be given to accommodating older ways of doing things, too. Once I get time to analyze that part of the report, I can see if they did.

But on the subject of townhomes, it gets worse. Lets take as an example, two townhome complexes facing each other across a street. Since all the units face the street and (we’ll assume) have the minimum frontage, they are eligible for city trash service. However, the townhomes on the west side of the street are individually metered. The townhomes on the east side are “master metered” — there is only one water account for all the units. The east side is going to get a huge discount on its trash fees. I wonder if developers will promote master-metering as a bonus? “You won’t even have to pay that pesky garbage fee. Your association handles it; all of you combined will pay only forty-two dollars!”

Wow, that’s fair. And we haven’t reached bottom yet; what if the west side doesn’t meet the new density guidelines, but the east side does? Now the west side is paying full cost, and yet the homewoners are not getting any service! Well, now we start getting complicated. Remember, in the Chronicle they talked about the same townhome complex being able to get trash service to some units, and not to others? Townhomes that don’t face the street won’t get trash services, even if they’re part of a complex in which other units do face the street and do get service!

You want fair? Remember, more than 8 units in an apartment complex, and you don’t get trash service. So what is the difference between a small ten-unit apartment complex tucked away on a Montrose-area street, and a twenty-unit master-metered townhome complex in the Third Ward? Well, obviously, the tenants of the apartment complex are going to pay twice the pro-rata share of the “heavy trash pickup fee” as the townhome owners, yet get no service at all. (Who cares if the landlord raises the rents a bit more?)

Does this make sense?

It should be clear by now that the Public Works and Solid Waste departments have two entirely separate missions, data sets, and computer systems designed to do two entirely different jobs, and Houston’s 80-year history of hostility to an overall development/zoning/building plan has allowed a proliferation of residential styles that hampers creating a set of rules that are fair and won’t cause more problems than they will solve. Meshing these systems and keeping more than the minimum number of people from being screwed by the fee is going to be a stone cold bitch.

But wait, lets check our assumption here. Do utility customers get charged the fee if they have a water account, even though they don’t get trash service? Am I just blowing smoke–have they thought of all this and planned for it? Let’s check the report, page 12:

A monthly fee should be charged to each unit eligible for City solid waste collection service… Task Force Members believe $3.50 per month is a cost that can be borne in all Houston communities, and F&A estimates that $19 million would be generated annually by this fee.

Ohhhhhh, ok, so we’re not going to charge everyone, just the “eligible” accounts Well, that’s a relief!

Let’s see….there’s over 440,000 water accounts out there, but there’s 456,000 garbage customers served by Solid Waste. If we’re not going to charge ineligible accounts, then lets start removing them. Of the water accounts, between 10-20,000 are multi-family, which includes everything from the aforementioned garage apartments and master-metered townhomes, to large apartment complexes–so some of them will be charged and some won’t. That will just have to be figured out. (I think I’ve made the case above, just how arbitrary and difficult that will be.) Something like 70-80,000 are commercial properties, about 7,000 are lawn sprinkler meters, and that leaves about 350,000 residential — and note that to the water department, there is no difference between an individually metered townhome and a $170,000 home — both have one meter and one account. Maybe one has a bigger meter, but that’s it. But the two departments will see a twenty-unit master-metered townhome vastly differently. One requires a single bill going to the homeowners association, the other sees twenty bills going to individual homeowners. How will this be reconciled? Twenty new accounts in the Public Works database, and twenty more bills mailed per month?

Leaving that aside, lets look at the individually-metered units again. So how does the water department figure out which accounts should be charged and which ones don’t? Units with insufficient frontal footage or not facing the street don’t get service — but that means zilch insofar as having an individual water meter, so again the departments differ by function. Of course, Solid Waste can supply a list of addresses to be charged, but invariably, there will be differences. It will take months to hand-check (and possibly field-verify) each of the differences, to ensure the water department is billing everyone correctly. Since Public Works is doing the billing, it will have to be the one doing the verifying. (Hope you weren’t expecting your meter read this month.) And then there’s the inevitable errors. Sometimes two databases within Public Works don’t put the same address in the same Key Map square; the Mayor’s hoping the addresses match perfectly between two different departments? Ugh.

Then there’s payment and billing problems. Public Works already had the “Extra Can Charge” dumped on it by a prior administration, which strangely enough, also involved charging more for a service formerly provided for “free,” that is, from tax revenue. In one of those interdepartmental “things,” PW&E balked at handling the charges, because it is, as I’ve said before, an Enterprise fund. Now let’s say the customer can’t pay all their bill one month. Who gets what the customer did pay–Public Works or Solid Waste? Public Works insisted that it be the one to get the money, since it is expected to pay for it’s own operations; if there’s any shortage, it comes out of Solid Waste’s portion of the bill first. This means if a citizen doesn’t pay all of their bill, they could lose their can — even if the deferment is agreed to by the water department, and the customer agrees to a payment plan! Worse, even if the unpaid balance is in dispute, they can lose their extra can — because PW&E can’t or won’t make the distinction, and Public Works’ computers can’t talk to Solid Waste’s and say “it’s us, leave them alone.” (Two words: obsolescent mainframe.) Manual reports can be pulled, assuming the data is queried properly, but frankly, the necessity of sending a paper report between departments in the 21st century just makes me want to cry.

Now take that and expand it to the $3.50 monthly fee, which for many households at the poverty level, will be an increase of about 1/3 in their bill. Do they lose heavy trash service? Or all trash service? It would be interesting to see what happens the first time a customer refuses to pay the fee each month, and lets it accumulate on their bill. Do they get charged late penalties? Will their water service be cut off?

Perhaps I should note here, that the Solid Waste Task Force does not list a single employee of Public Works among its members. In fact, of the “City Support Staff” listed, the departments represented are Planning and Development, Solid Waste, Legal, Finance and Administration, Mayor, and City Controller. Not Public Works. In short, no one responsible for actually implementing the program was consulted to determine its practicality.

Ain’t it always that way? But I have to wonder– what did Mike Marcotte do to get on Bill’s bad side, and get cut out of the loop? I’d be a little miffed over having this pile of dung dropped on my Department without any input.

Oh well, So we’ve got to eliminate businesses, some apartment complexes (but not others), some townhomes (but not others), houses — sprinkler systems…hey, now there’s a thought. I mean, they are eliminated, right? What if that $170,000 home has a second meter for a lawn sprinkler system? Does the owner get charged once, or twice? We will assume once. So, we have all these exceptions and exemptions, and have somehow miraculously parsed through two large databases and resolved all the errors and discrepancies, and it looks like at most, only 350,000 water accounts will match up to trash fees. Since Solid Waste claims 456,000 pickups, that means, somewhere or another, we’re picking up 100,000 customers who are receiving city garbage service but not city water service.

Excuse me? One hundred thousand households are either master-metered or not served by the City of Houston Public Works, and will presumably need to have accounts created for them? Does that number seem a little….excessive? Not to mention that it’s about 20% of the total size of the water department’s current database? And that will be a 20% increase in paper and postage costs, won’t it? Gee, I have to feel for their envelope stuffer, even if it is a machine. (Yes, a machine. One. No backup.) That ought to drive up maintenance and repair costs, too.

Paper and postage alone is going to be a half-million a year, easy. Overtime, implementation costs, increased customer service calls….. Hmmm. speaking of which, did anyone suggest increasing the water department’s budget for all this? And will that come out of the money raised by the so-called “Heavy Trash” fee, or will it be a tax hidden in the cost of running the water department? (C’mon, you have to ask?)

Well then, lets look at the revenue figures again. The report says that $19,000,000 per year would be generated @ $3.50 a month per account, so the math should be easy. Nineteen million divided by 12, divided again by $3.50 gives us 452,381 accounts being charged each month.

Wait a minute. There’s potentially 456,000 trash “accoount” and just over 440,000 utility accounts. You know, it would be much simpler and cheaper for them to just charge every water account….

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Nah. I mean, we’re faced with a choice between the Task Force being fundamentally dishonest about the whole program and not bothering to include anyone from Public Works because it was the intention all along to just tack the fee onto every utility account regardless…*

Or they’re all just fundamentally stupid and uninformed of the difficulties in implementing their little brainstorm, because they didn’t have the common sense to bring the any of the people who were going to implement the program into the planning.

Are they evil or just stupid?

Could they be stupidly evil?

Of course, if this idea was Bill White’s all along, and the Task Force was just for cover, then who needs to plan? The king has commanded the tides to retreat! It shall be so!

And on that note, I’ll close with an invitation to return for part IV of this series, where we dig even deeper into the Task Force Report, in order to expose false assumptions and twisted reasoning.

*Bet you wondered why I went to the trouble of showing how unfair it was to just charge all the accounts and then made out like it didn’t matter since that wasn’t the plan. Now you know… first, it was everyone’s automatic assumption, so I had to show why it wouldn’t work. Second, I had to show that as a backup plan to what should be done, it still won’t work. It isn’t impossible, but to call this plan “half-assed” would be to compliment it.