For the last two years, condo owners like Norm Brown have been forced to double up on costs for garbage collection.
“We paid for it in our taxes like every other homeowner,” said Brown, President of the Prescott Condo Association. “But we were also forced to use a contractor to haul it, because the city chose not to take our garbage.”
A 40 dollar collection rebate per condo unit was in place to help cancel out those hauling costs until it was ended as a money saving measure for the reopened 2017 budget.
“We made some difficult choices in 2017 with two budgets in one year,” Mayor Michael Fougere said Tuesday.
Since then, Brown and other condo owners have been pushing for the rebate’s return. That push paid off Tuesday, as council approved a reinstatement of the garbage repayment as part of the 2019 city budget.
Fougere says removing the rebate was never meant to be a permanent move.
“It obviously was meant to be a temporary withdrawal of [the rebate], and I’m very pleased that we brought it back,” Fougere said. “I think residents should be very happy with that.”
The refund mainly applies to apartment-style condo buildings the does not provide garbage collection service to.
“[Owners] won’t see it as a reduction, but it’ll reduce the annual expenses, which then reflects in the condo fees that they pay on an annual basis,” Brown said, adding he sees the reinstatement as a ‘moral victory’.
“A lot of our condo owners are senior citizens on fixed incomes, so anything that you can manage, the better off they are.”
The garbage collection rebate for condo owners comes into effect on January 1 along with the rest of the 2019 city budget.
