Gone are the years when your garbage rate stayed the same for five years at a time, as it did in those increments between 2007 and 2023 when Waste Pro was Palm Coast’s garbage hauler. When the city negotiated a contract with its new hauler in 2023, FCC Environmental, one of the contractual provisions was an annual increase based on the previous year’s inflation rate, if with a 4 percent cap.
The increase you’ll see on the garbage item in your utility bill starting in October: 3.75 percent. So your monthly cost will go from $32.32 to $33.53, a monthly increase of $1.21, an annual increase of $14.52. Don’t be surprised: the city has been raising your water and sewer rates in accordance with inflation for years. (It raised rates 3 percent last year.)
That utility-rate adjustment didn’t come up when city staff presented the utility budget to the council this morning, but it did when Public Works Director Matt Mancill presented the garbage hauling budget, surprising Mayor David Alfin.
“Significant increase. You all comfortable with that?” Alfin asked his colleagues. “It’s been explained, but I’m troubled by it. I don’t know that I have a solution for it, but it’s a big number.”
Exclusively fee-based, that fund is set up as its own “enterprise” fund, separately from the city’s general fund. Charges in 2023 totaled $15.3 million, growing to an estimated $17.2 million by the time this year ends, and projected to reach $18.6 million next year. That’s due to the city’s sharply increasing population. Between last year and this year, the city added 2,299 households or accounts (from 42,186 accounts to 44,485). Mancill is projecting a 12.2 percent budget increase, with every dollar in new revenue accounted for in expenses.
That raised questions for City Council member Theresa Pontieri, who asked for a more detailed breakdown of the operating expenditures. “What we continue to see year after year is, our revenues have gone up by 12.2 percent, and coincidentally our expenditures have also now gone up by 12.2 percent,” Pontieri said. “We are spending as much or more as we’re bringing in, and I think that there needs to be a change in mentality from that perspective.” Pontieri said she wasn’t referring only to the garbage-hauling contract, but to all divisions citywide.
“I get it, costs have gone up for the city just like they’ve gone up for the residents,” she said. “We are not immune from inflation. The city has experienced inflation just like everybody in this room and in their households. But we have to be stewards of the taxpayer dollars, so I think that it should be a policy of our city to say, You know what, even though the revenues went up by 12.2 percent, let’s see if we can keep the expenditure increase to 10 percent.” In the aggregate, department by department, that would add up to millions every year she said.
Mancill said the city doesn’t control the operational part of its contract with FCC Environmental. As their number of households go up, their costs go up, and the city passes on the revenue to the company. The only internal operations to Palm Coast’s budget amount to a solid waste supervisor and her inspector. The CPI adjustment, he said, was the result of previous experience with Waste Pro. “Towards the end of that contract, we ran into a lot of cost issues that affected levels of service for our residents,” Mancill said.
Pontieri assured him that her suggestions were not about him or a reflection of his management, but about citywide budgets.
FCC Environmental just won a contract in St. Johns County and in Clay County, after winning Sarasota County in March. Waste Pro is still the contractor in unincorporated Flagler County.
