Is it time to take the town back?

It's beginning to seem like if crippling local businesses were an
Olympic event, the city of Livingston would take the gold.

It's a carefully guarded secret that merchants within the borders of
the city of Livingston appear to be paying as much as twenty times
more for their garbage as their counterparts in the county. Taking
one example just asking around, a city restaurant, we'll call it
Restaurant A, is paying a typical $600 a month for its trash. In
contrast, Restaurant B, just across the line in the county, is paying
about $30 a month, for the same kind of business and pretty much the
same garbage. As part of this, city businesses are told, in an
environmentally unfriendly way, they cannot recycle their glass, so
the city can force the glass weight to be included in the grossly
expensive billed tonnage. In an informal survey of the Livingston
merchants versus county merchants this contrast continues to pan
out. In another local business's case, for equivalent-sized small
towns in its chain, the rates it pays the city, it turns out, are the
highest in the nation.

Right now all businesses in the city of Livingston are being charged
around $110 a ton for garbage while the residents pay $45 per ton - a
$65 a ton difference. The disproportional Livingston tax on business
versus residential garbage has been in place for some time, but no
one ever seems to question it. When asked how much they are paying a
ton for their garbage, it has been typical that businesses have had
to figure it out themselves. All they know is they are struggling to
stay in business, and the city doesn't seem to be their ally.

The county is charging its businesses a flat $360. Simpler,
infinitely cheaper than the six or seven grand the city businesses
get gouged for annually, the county still stays in the black, and
even this can be appealed to the refuse board under special circumstances.

Sometimes in a small town when things obviously don't make sense,
they don't make sense for a reason. Remember how the city supposedly
strapped for cash pulled away from the county and chose to build a
million dollar redundant transfer station, possibly in a carcinogenic
plume, 1100 feet from the Yellowstone River, rather than use the
existing transfer station built jointly by both the city and the
county? Is a possible explanation the fact that were Livingston to
join the refuse board, under Montana state law all incomes would have
to be paid directly to the refuse board, including that nice
additional $65 a ton the city is extracting from its businesses?

Livingston's official position that the county refuse board is "too
expensive" reflects over $340,000 in county expenses for green box
guards which the county was forced to hire, replete with vehicles,
maintenance, insurance, retirement, etc., due to the suit instigated
by the city itself, not the county, that the county was letting city
merchants dump their refuse in the county green boxes, and hence, the
city was deprived of, as they put it, their "rightful
revenue". Without the lawsuit-mandated expenses, though, all county
residents, and hence Livingston, would be paying about $50+ per
residence per year less. (The figures sometimes get murky to figure
out because they are treated in terms of tons instead of a form
people can more easily compare.) And it looks like the city's own
original estimates of the price of handling trash on its own were
artificially low, since they apparently didn't reflect the new
additional cost of driving large trucks to the Logan landfill or even
Great Falls and back. Hint: those trucks are not energy efficient
economy vehicles, they're not meant or maintained for long-distance
driving, it's a lot of paid hours of driving, and the exorbitant cost
of fuel in the world is probably only going to keep going up.

The city, expecting the extra $65 per ton from its merchants, has
gone into debt based on that in a variety of areas. It appears to
have already committed that money into the future with off-budget
expenses like lease-purchased vehicles, expenses, pet projects, and
salaries using it. Is that above board and fair to struggling city
merchants? With "solutions" like this, things will only get tougher
as the price of fuel and maintenance on the city trash trucks
skyrockets with the long-distance hauling arrangements. It's not you
they're looking out for.

Now let's assume you want intelligent, honest, rational
government. Just for a minute, for sake of argument. You could work
out a deal with the county, kill the costs not already wasted on a
unnecessary redundant transfer station, save your taxpayers money,
thereby helping the local economy, and treat local business
as friends and employers, not a bunch of unlimited ATM
machines. Would that truly be so unreasonable?

In tough economic times when businesses are beginning to knuckle
under with the weight of their own trash costs, it is wrong that this
has gone unchallenged for so long. Something smells, and it's not
the dumpster out behind. Is it time to take the town back?