Some Residents Find Good Reason to Toss New Trash-Fee Plan

By CATHERINE KOZAK

By Catherine Kozak

The Virginian-Pilot

Mundane as it is, trash has become an emotional issue on Ocracoke Island, where a proposal to “pay as you throw” is raising a stink with villagers.

All county residents last fiscal year paid $150 annually per household for garbage disposal. Ocracoke businesses paid $1,000. The fees covered 40 percent of the costs of hauling and disposal, and the rest was paid out of $600,000 in property tax revenue.

But now the Hyde County Board of Commissioners wants fees to cover 100 percent of the costs. The trash fee would increase throughout the county, but Ocracoke would pay an additional charge per bag or container load.

With Ocracoke’s seasonal population, vast visitation numbers and disparate amounts of waste among households and businesses, that goal has ignited confusion and controversy on the island.

“It’s a very tricky situation to get garbage out of here,” said Gene Ballance, a Hyde County commissioner from Ocracoke. “We don’t want to make it worse. We want to make it fair.”

At a public hearing in Ocracoke last week, it was apparent that the “pay as you throw” idea had barely budged from where it rested when it was abandoned in 2002 under public uproar.

“We find out there’s really no consensus here on what should be done,” Ballance said about the well-attended hearing.

Fred Westervelt, chairman of the Ocracoke Lodging Association, said he finds the whole proposal “ill-conceived.”

“There are a lot of deficiencies in the plan,” he said. “Pretty uniformly, people found it objectionable and pretty inadequately planned.”

Hyde County throws out about 5,000 tons of trash a year, about half of it produced on Ocracoke, said Carl Classen, interim county manager. It costs $1.2 million to haul it to Bertie County’s landfill and pay the tipping fees.

Rather than raise taxes, Classen said, the county is proposing to cover the disposal costs by charging residents higher solid waste fees, distributed equitably to individuals and businesses. But that’s not as easy in Hyde County as it might sound. Mainland Hyde is generally rural, poor and sparsely populated. Ocracoke is less accessible, tiny and rich. Overrun with tourists in the summer and quiet in the winter, the island has wide swings in the amount of trash generated during the year.

Classen said he expects the board will act on the proposal at its Feb. 4 meeting.

One of the arguments for changing to a “pay as you throw” system on Ocracoke is that under the current system, every household – whether a rental cottage filled with partying young men or a home occupied by a single elderly person – pays the same fee. And businesses, from a modest coffee shop to a busy bar, also pay the same.

Because the volume of trash and the amount of the tipping fees is unlikely to be reduced, “pay as you throw” makes sense as a way to divide the disposal costs, said Al Scarborough, an island resident and a member of the Hyde County Solid Waste Committee. The result, however, is that some will pay less, and some will pay much, much more.

Calculating fees by any other measure – say, the number of bedrooms – is nothing less than an administrative nightmare, Scarborough said.

“Every factor becomes more and more complicated,” he said. “If you sit and analyze it, the conclusion you come up with is, well, the only fair way is to pay for what you throw out.”

But, Westervelt wondered, who’s going to pay for what the day- tripping tourist throws out? And where are they going to throw it? Now, no one objects to which containers people put their garbage in , he said, but that will change real quick if people are being charged per bag or container load.

“It’s going to end up being a siege mentality, with people protecting their Dumpsters,” he said.

Westervelt, who owns The Cove Bed & Breakfast with his wife Ernie, said that if the county is going to charge the proposed $3.25 per 30-gallon bag, it also should reduce the tax burden on the village residents.

After all, Ernie Westervelt said, the island’s booming tourist industry generates the bulk of the county’s tax revenue. And because garbage disposal is typically a tax-paid public service, she questions what the county will next expect islanders to pay for.

“Dial 911 and give your credit card number?” she said, wondering.

Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711,

cate.kozak@pilotonline.com

the issue

Hyde County wants fees to cover 100 percent of trash disposal costs. The trash fee would increase throughout the county, but Ocracoke residents and businesses would pay an additional charge per bag or container load. the controversy

The county wants solid waste fees to be distributed equitably to individuals and businesses. But parts of Hyde County are generally rural, poor and sparsely populated. Ocracoke is less accessible, tiny and rich with wide swings in the amount of trash generated during the year.

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