Niles residents will soon receive their first bills for garbage collection, almost two years after village trustees voted to raise property taxes and separate the garbage collection bill from the main property tax bill.
Bills will arrive four times a year, and most homeowners will pay $50 per quarter or $17.59 each month for garbage collection, according to information posted on the village website.
The dates for trash collection will not change, per village information. A “frequently asked questions” page casts the change as a way to increase transparency.
“Some of us were paying more than we should for pick-up, some too little,” the page reads. “It’s also more transparent. Instead of being buried in a general tax bill, we can now see precisely what we’re getting for our money.”
In an email to Pioneer Press, village spokesperson Mitch Johnson said the preceding model for funding garbage service had been to roll waste fees into property taxes and then pass those funds to Groot, the garbage service that handles trash collection in Niles and many other suburbs.
“The village will no longer pass through the municipal waste fees, and Groot will instead send a bill directly to each customer,” he wrote.
Johnson added that most of Niles’ peer communities use a separate garbage bill to pay for waste collection services.
The change has been a long time coming, but it’s still proving a sore point for some Niles residents, who are complaining on social media.
The garbage bill was also a periodic issue during the campaign for village board, with a set of challengers to incumbent candidates for trustee casting the change as a failure of transparency.
When the board was considering the change, Mayor George Alpogianis said raising property taxes and separating the garbage bill from the rest of the tax bill were in service of creating “a better, nicer, cleaner, stronger, more vibrant community.”
