Editor,
Will rate increases eventually cease or continue to increase?
As a resident for 50 years and homeowner with a separately located studio, this rate hike along with under grounding utilities creates a rising cost of living burden reaching untenable levels, affordable mostly to the top 10-15 percent.
It’s cumulative effect is driving out long-time residents, retirees, keeping out new artists, valued teachers, start up entrepreneurs, necessary city employees and forced many who have worked and or lived in Laguna for decades to move out of town.
Except for top-tier McMansioneers and high-income flyers, many will be unable to keep pace with the rising levies on their homes and businesses. The increase for refuse collection cumulatively affects access to affordable living and working space and those who bring talents that enrich and keep Laguna’s reputation alive as an arts colony. The ability to stay, work and live in Laguna Beach is being offered up to the privileged few, to those who flip properties and reap exorbitant rents and may not even live here and who will not replace the activism and civic involvement of the givers to this community.
Residences, apartments, small business and studios are no longer affordable as costs and taxes get passed on; these continual rate hikes prevent feasible ways to plan and develop affordable live-work space for artists, homes for young people and the elderly, those on limited or fixed incomes and those who settled and lived here for decades.
Some criteria for rate increase should include:
Competitive bids from at least two other collection sources.
Develop a coalition of all Orange County cities and conservation groups to require landfills to reuse and profit from “waste”, offsetting increases and incrementally and regularly reducing collection fees.
Scaled tax credit incentive should be available to Laguna Beach property owners when trash pickup is reduced to a minimum, once every 14 or 21 days, rather than weekly.
Cost analysis presented to the public showing the city’s cost for administrating refuse collection over the past five years.
Notice of public hearing must include a public vote taken on the date of the hearing and required impact on increasing property taxes.
Leah Vasquez, Laguna Beach
$5 dollars makes the village holler! McMansioners, flippers and high income flyers thank you for building and paying taxes and fees to the city including thousands of $ directly to the LB school district. Keeping everyone’s fees and taxes lower and making the schools in LB some of the best in the state.