Port Coquitlam councillors voted unanimously Monday to waive two years of retroactive waste collection charges for 87 residents who, due to a city error, had not been charged their fees for years.
Several residents complained last week that they were being punished for the city's mistake when they were told they would have to pay the 2011 charges and those for the two previous years, totalling more than $530 per resident.
Now, the city will only collect for this year's service, a decision Willow Glen Estates strata president Clint Grayson said will be welcome news for low-income residents in his neighbourhood.
"It is fantastic," said Grayson, who lives in the 25-unit strata whose residents had not been charged a garbage levy since 1989. "It will really help the people who are on fixed incomes. There were some people that were really stressing about this."
When the city discovered the problem, staff told residents that it was customary to collect for the previous two years when administrative errors occur. Residents affected by the discrepancy were told they could pay the bill in three $176 payments over the next few months.
But when several members of the Willow Glen Estates strata council asked to see the written policy, staff could not produce a document. The city is now taking steps to formalize the two-year collection practice.
The decision not to collect retroactive payments came during a closed meeting Monday night. Staff said the in camera meeting was not open to the public due to a possibility of legal action on the issue.
But based on public feedback and the need for a consistently-applied system for dealing with collection discrepancies, staff recommended council waive the retroactive billing, which the city said was valued at approximately $27,000.
Residents who have already paid their retroactive fees will have their money returned to them, the city said in a press release.
Because Mayor Greg Moore was one of the 87 residents caught up in the billing discrepancy, he recused himself from the vote and said Coun. Michael Wright would be the spokesperson on the subject.
Wright said the error was first discovered when the city updated its billing software and found that a number of residents were never charged for their garbage levy. Some residents had not had their fees collected going back more than two decades and staff estimates that more than $100,000 in revenue has been lost.
"It slipped through the cracks," he said. "It was never picked up."
The city, Wright added, collects garbage from 13,000 units, making the 87 homes that did not pay a small percentage. Residents who paid their fees, he said, subsidized those who were not charged, which works out to about $1 per home, per year.
