HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — ABC13 has reported extensively on the City of Houston’s new $5-per-month fee for trash collection, but it turns out it will bring in less than some anticipated.
City officials say that’s due to the fact that the fee is subject to a state sales tax that has caught some leaders off-guard.
“It was a surprise to me,” at-large councilmember Sallie Alcorn said.
A representative from the city’s legal department said the decision was made by the state comptroller’s office.
The sales tax was discussed extensively at City Hall this week during a meeting of City Council’s Committee on Budget and Fiscal Affairs.
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“I don’t recall us ever talking about sales tax being part of (the fee),” District A Councilwoman Amy Peck said at the meeting.
City Finance Director Melissa Dubowski was asked why the matter was never brought up during the budget-discussion process.
“I think we were doing a lot of this legal research around the time of the budget discussion,” Dubowski said. “I can’t remember when we got the final information from the comptroller’s office, but it was something we were talking about and researching internally.”
Peck said the fee was supposed to bring in $24 million to the city’s solid waste department in each of the next two fiscal years.
She said it’ll now be a little over $22 million each of those years due to the presence of the tax.
Alcorn and Peck say they hope the city will go back to the state and argue that the fee should be exempt from the tax due to a technicality surrounding where money from the fee is allocated.
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