One week after his budget team held closed-door meetings with aldermen, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is all but saying that a garbage-collection fee is coming to Chicago.



Struggling to solve a $30 billion pension crisis that has dropped the city’s bond rating to junk status, Emanuel needs $754 million in new revenue to balance his 2016 budget and shore up police and fire pensions, even under the best-case scenario.

“Thirty-five aldermen. Seventy-plus ideas . . . I would say
there’s building consensus around at least two things on the revenue side: Some form of a garbage fee like other communities around the state and country have. [And] a fee around e-cigarettes and other tobacco products that are not cigarettes,” Emanuel told WLS-AM Radio (890).
The mayor’s office refused to go beyond those remarks.
But Ald. Pat O’Connor (40th), Emanuel’s City Council floor leader, said it’s no longer an issue of whether Chicago will have a garbage-collection fee. The question is, how much?


“That’s where the real discussion will take place. It will be around the cost, rather than the enablement. We need to see the numbers that show how much we’ll save and how much it would generate,” he said. 

O’Connor noted that a “very large percentage” of Chicagoans already pay for garbage collection. They rent or own in multiunit residential buildings that don’t get city pick-ups. “If you’ve never done it before, a lot of people will say, `This is terrible.’ But to the extent that Chicago is becoming a destination for people who are not native Chicagoans — and that’s a growing number of people — this isn’t going to be new. It’ll be something they’ve seen before. It might be easier [to sell politically] than we think,” O’Connor said.

City Hall sources pegged the number of households that already pay for private garbage collection at 400,000. Another 600,000 get city pickups at no additional cost.
In at least one North Shore suburb, a resident with one cart for routine garbage and another for recyclables pays $104.72 every four months or $314.16 a year for both pick-ups. The weekly pick-ups are made by a private scavenger service that uses one-man crews.

In Chicago, the Department of Streets and Sanitation still operates with three employees on a truck. Unless work rules are changed or garbage collection is privatized, costs would be higher, but the first-ever fees would have to be lower.

Chicago would almost certainly have to start smaller to get residents of 600,000 single-family homes, two-, three-flats and four-flats used to the idea of paying for a service they’ve grown accustomed to getting for free.