The Island Government of the Public Entity of Saba will be implementing a Garbage Collection Fee as of December 8th, 2011. The Fee is being implemented to help balance the costs of waste management. The Garbage Collection Fee is based on an Island Ordinance passed during the governing period 2003-2007 which received unanimous support at the time.

The fee is broken down into two categories: residential and commercial. The residential fee is $100.56 per year, which amounts to approximately eight dollars per month. The commercial fee is $234.64 or approximately twenty dollars per month. The billing cycle for the Garbage Collection Fee is one year, ranging from December 2011 until November 2012. The collection of this fee will be done at the Tax Office and the deadline for payment is March 1, 2012. The bills will be distributed during the next week.

In order to build the database for the billing system an island wide survey was completed as well as a thorough analysis of meter information received from GEBE. Because this will be the first billing cycle it is expected that there will be some errors, so government will create a complaint committee who will deal with all objections. Persons will have until February 1, 2012 to protest their bill in writing to the Executive Council who will then forward this information to the committee for their advice. 

The implementation of this fee has been delayed for over four years. This reason for this delay was that there was little being done in the area of waste management. Now that the landfill has a full time manager and recycling will start in stages, it was necessary to implement this fee to help offset the additional costs involved.

In their statement, The Executive Council said that it is understandable that the implementation of this fee might be met with some reluctance, “This fee has been budgeted for the past years and was never collected which has brought with it much concern from the CFT. With the additional costs of the improved services (landfill management, new garbage bins and the introduction of recycling) the Council was left with no other choice than to implement it to offset the costs of these additional services.”