Fairhaven Residents Face New Trash Fee

Remember the good old days?

Each week, you'd put your trash out in front of your home and it would magically be taken away. Of course, trash collection was never truly free. It cost money to have it done. Any service does. Nothing in life is free.

However, somehow,  the generations before us could figure out how to put together a budget that would allow for services such as trash collection to be covered by normal taxation like property and excise taxes.

Those days are quickly slipping away. The latest SouthCoast town to implement a trash tax will be Fairhaven.

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The Board of Public Works voted 3-2 Monday night to charge every household in the town a $100 fee in exchange for what had always been a free service. Roughly 7,000 households will pay $100 to help offset the rising costs of trash collection. That is a total haul of $700,000.

The $700,000 won't cover the $2.2 million dollar shortfall of next year's town budget, but still, it's not a bad night's work.

READ MORE: Massachusetts Excise Taxes Could Go Supersized

The town administrator says the idea will be revisited next year. That said, taxes never really go away. That's the hard truth.

Fairhaven residents will likely never again have trash services without this trash tax.  That's just the way it is.  This year the trash tax will be $100.  What will next year cost?

It will cost anything the town government wants it to cost.