New bins for recycling and trash the city purchased last year. The administration’s proposed 2016 budget plans to expand the investment in sanitation through a new department devoted to cleaning up the city.
The Papenfuse administration made an impassioned plea Wednesday night for the creation of a neighborhood services division at city hall, asking City Council to approve the use of trash bill money on an expansive plan to keep the city clean.
The plan calls for 18 new hires and $1.3 million in equipment purchases, while also aiming to wean the general government off a subsidy from trash bills going back several years. “This is a truer accounting,” Papenfuse said of the effort to group all sanitation-related services under their own separate fund.
The plan follows on recommendations in a consulting report released last year, which urged the city to create an “enterprise account” funded with trash bills and covering a broad array of services including leaf collection, litter patrols, recycling, enforcement of sanitation codes and even some property demolition and cleanup.
Papenfuse and his department heads made their case in the second of two hearings on his proposed 2016 budget this week, as council members in advance of a final vote Dec. 15 called up officials one at a time to examine their proposed expenses.
They heard about items running the gamut of local government, from the cost of portable toilets to the challenges of managing summer crowds at city pools.
But the neighborhood services proposal was the budget’s largest innovation by far, representing both a commitment to keep sanitation work in-house and a wager that trash will be lucrative enough to justify major investments in equipment and staff.
In a sprawling but emphatic opening statement, public works director Aaron Johnson praised his department’s progress in recent years and said it was time to invest customers’ trash money in improving the services they’re paying for.
“It’s a money-maker,” Johnson said of the city’s sanitation services. “The place that generates the money should be able to pay itself.”
The budget calls for the purchase of six trash trucks, two street sweepers, a specialized leaf collection machine and new route-tracking software, among other items. It also seeks to hire 17 union workers, including four in-house mechanics, a bill collector and a specialist to help operate the city’s 311 system.
Trash bills will also subsidize general government operations, with a direct transfer of $1.1 million, down from $1.7 million last year. Papenfuse said he plans to eliminate the subsidy in 2017.
The new division is part of an ambitious budget proposal that includes a $3 million tax hike to cover growing health care and pension costs, as well as a $1 million shortfall in revenues expected from the parking lease the city entered in 2013.
An updated version of the state’s recovery plan for Harrisburg, which has yet to be considered by the city or the state court overseeing it, expresses general agreement with the creation of the new division but seeks to monitor its finances closely.
“The expanded employment needs anticipated by the Neighborhood Services fund must be covered by an appropriate level of fees that are reasonable and supported by both citizen users as well as commercial users of the services,” the plan says.
The plan calls for the city to produce a quarterly report on the performance of the new division as part of its financial review process.
In 2013, the recovery plan had called for sanitation services to be privatized, but the move was rejected by council. Johnson thanked council Wednesday night, saying the city’s in-house services were better than any private company could offer.
“There’s nothing like having your own,” Johnson told council, adding that the city had unique sanitation needs that required intimate knowledge of the neighborhoods. “You stepped up to the plate and you saved a lot of people’s jobs,” he said.
