Illegal rubbish dumping at Dubbo could rise if a waste levy was rolled out to regional areas by state authorities, Dubbo City Council warns.
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Waste generators were likely to avoid the higher tipping fees that would have to accompany the levy's introduction by making unauthorised disposals, a manager said in a report to a council committee.
His advice to the council will inform its submission opposing the expansion of the Section 88 Waste Levy, which councillors say would be a $430,000 cost shift by the state government.
The levy is a charge on landfill owners in the most populous areas of NSW for every tonne of waste received and is designed to encourage recycling and other resource-recovery options.
A $10 per tonne charge payable by landfill owners is up for discussion and the council forecast it would have to increase tipping fees and waste management charges paid by residents to cover the burden.
Current levels of illegal dumping were "manageable" but would "markedly increase" if the city was subject to the levy, civil infrastructure and solid waste manager Steve Clayton said in the report.
He said a rise in the practice was evident in other areas where the levy applied.
The council would have increased costs trying to deal with the illegal dumping, he said.
The manager said although the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) proposed to tackle the problem by providing councils with access to funding programs targeting illegal dumping he had some doubt on the wisdom of the action.
"State funding programs are never guaranteed to be ongoing and regardless of the funding issues, this has the potential to consume considerable time and resources in identifying, reporting, cleaning up and prosecuting offenders, an expense on councils which could be more productively applied in pursuing their own resource-recovery initiatives," Mr Clayton said in his report to the most recent meeting of the works and services committee.
The council's three rural household waste transfer stations at Eumungerie, Ballimore and Toongi were currently unfenced and unsupervised and would under a levy system be targeted as "no cost" disposal sites, he said.
"To avoid this impact, council would be faced with the costs of securing these sites and supervising them during restricted hours of operation," he said.
"Council may also have to consider replacing the rural resident access charge... with a user-pay tipping charge."
The council will provide a submission to the NSW EPA that expresses a preference for no expansion of the levy.