New Mayor John Whitmire continues to say that Houston is broke. And now city leaders are tossing around the idea of imposing a 'garbage fee' to bring in more money from taxpayers.
"The city of Houston has been talking about imposing a garbage fee for as long as I can remember" said former Houston mayoral candidate, Bill King, "I'm not sure that it's going to bring in the $100 million dollars that they are planning on."
That's because right now, 80-85% of the trash in the city of Houston is picked up by private contractors.
"If all of the sudden everybody has to pay, how many are going to stay with the city and how many are going to go with private contractors?" King told KTRH, "Then they're not going to have that revenue that they thought was coming in."
If that's not bad enough, the city of Houston's trash collection service has been flat out awful.
"When you start actually sort of breaking it down" noted King, "There are houses in Houston that already use a private contractor. They pay, as opposed to having a free service, because the city's service is so terrible."
Simply put, the 'garbage fee' idea will likely be thrown out, by most Houstonians.