The town/village of Harrison has canceled its commercial garbage and recycling program.
But some residents, due to a technicality, will also feel the effects of the change.
The town’s reasoning behind the cancellation is that it costs too much money for the Department of Public Works to continue picking up trash that exceeds two 48-gallon pails per unit.
“It’s a costly program and we just can’t afford to do it anymore; the trucks, manpower, it’s just too much,” Harrison Mayor Ron Belmont, a Republican, said. “We have to make decisions that are not very popular sometimes.”
Maintaining the program currently costs the town $1 million per year, and the fees only add up to $250,000 per year in revenue, leading to a $750,000 net loss.
Anthony Robinson, the commissioner of public works, has said during previous town board meetings that in order to keep the program going, the DPW would have to implement a rate hike so high that it would exceed the costs incurred by the affected locations for hiring a private carter.
Robinson added that the cost of a municipality collecting trash is “substantially higher” than the costs of a private sanitation business, which commercial properties will be forced to hire now.
According to the town code, commercial properties in Harrison not only include businesses, churches and schools, but also any residential property that consists of four or more family units.
Harrison House Condominium, located at 70 West St., is one of the complexes set to be affected.
Ron Bakay, the board president of the condos, told the town board that the 52 condominium owners who make up the complex pay the town and county taxes as residential owners, and are not actually businesses, despite the “commercial” classification.
“This is not a good situation,” Bakay said. “And it’s going to cost a lot of people in this town a lot of money over time.”
Bakay said now that the town’s decision is final, and commercial trash pickup will end after July 1, their condo manager is looking into multiple private carting services to find the best offer they can get. “Now we’re going to have to raise common charges, which we try our best to keep as low as possible,” he said. “We have several fixed income owners and I don’t think this is fair.”
