After hearing concerns from residents, the Presque Isle City Council is vowing to consider ways to control the nuisance and risk of fireworks, among other issues that await them when they reconvene in October.
The council turned its attention again to fireworks at its Sept. 7, 2016 meeting. Use of the loud pyrotechnic products has been a concern among some residents for some time, and Penny McHatten, a retiree who lives on DuPont Drive, brought the council a petition signed by 49 residents seeking to ban fireworks within the city limits. Over Labor Day weekend she also called the police as “excessive fireworks” went off seemingly in her backyard, which is a few hundred feet from Academy Street.
“Houses are too close together and the noise is too loud,” McHatten told the council. Earlier this summer at another meeting, she said that loud fireworks during summer holidays have been a problem for her dog — so much so that she gives her dog sedatives ahead of certain summer holidays.
Members of the city council told McHatten that they share her concerns and have heard from other residents, and they approved a plan to form a committee that will study options for adopting an ordinance aimed at solving the issue.
The council meeting then moved onto a discussion of the state of the pay-as-you-throw garbage program, which is on track for a $140,000 loss this fiscal year, as costs outpace revenue from sales of the bags.
The council authorized City Manager Martin Puckett and Public Works Director Dana Fowler to analyze different budgeting options for pay-as-you-throw.
It’s a complicated dynamic for the five-year-old garbage program, Fowler said. The recycling bag portion is breaking even and helping the city’s long-term finances by extending the life of the landfill, while trash bag sales are still dependent on some funding from tax dollars to cover the operating loss.
At current sales, bringing the revenue to meet the costs of the trash bags would require raising the prices by about 18 percent for the 13-gallon bags and 26 percent for the 30-gallon bags, to $2.20 and $4.38 per bag respectively, Fowler said.
Despite some controversy over the years, the PAYT program has helped more people reduce their overall trash, recycle more and compost natural waste, councillors said.
“Most people use pay-as-you-throw,” said Puckett, mentioning that the hauling services estimate that only around 100 Presque Isle households are not using the program’s bags.
If the PAYT bag prices are going to increase, several councillors, including Richard Engels and Mike Chasse, said they would have preferred to see prices go up incrementally — ideally it would have started last year, they said. The last increase was in January 2014, when prices for each bag size went up by 10 percent.
If the prices were raised by the 18-26 percent needed to cover the full costs of the program, it’s unclear what would happen. Fowler said there is a risk that residents will stop using the PAYT program and choose one of their other two options, a subscription to a hauling service or hauling their own trash out to the landfill and paying a tipping fee — either of which may be more or less expensive than PAYT, depending on their needs.
On the flip side, suggested Tom Berube, manager of Gils Sanitation, keeping the bag prices as they are or even lowering them could sustain or increase the use of the bags in the long-term, which could extend the life of the landfill.
Puckett said the issue of financing the PAYT program would be should be addressed as part of the next year’s budget, which councillors will be tackling this fall.
In other municipal matters, the city has received the results of a financial audit by RHR Smith, whose managing partner Ron Smith marked the city’s finances as “average” compared to peers in northern Maine. In his remarks to the council, Smith said he would recommend the city government try to grow its reserve account holding as much as 90 days equivalent of operating costs.
On property taxes, the city is going to continue waiting for the school district to finalize its budget before sending out tax bills. With the latest school budget being voted on Tuesday, Puckett said, Presque Isle’s mill rate would increase by 0.24 percent to $25.6 per $1,000 of assessed property value.
