Yellowknife city councillors have paused a plan to scrap amnesty days at the solid waste facility while they figure out more detail about what should replace them.
In July, city staff had asked council to end amnesty days on the grounds that the “chaotic” initiatives cost too much, cause safety concerns and undermine efforts to make the most of the landfill.
An amnesty day can cost more than $30,000, staff told councillors, at a time when the landfill is running a deficit of $1 million a year. (The amnesty means people don’t pay the usual residential tipping fee.)
Chris Vaughn, the city’s manager of sustainability and solid waste, said the sheer influx of people on amnesty days often overwhelmed staff and meant inappropriate materials were dumped without oversight. For example, highly flammable objects like propane tanks ended up in the wrong areas.
City staff said a voucher system could replace amnesty days – allowing residents to play a get-in-the-dump-free card twice a year, with some constraints – but the majority of councillors who spoke at the July meeting seemed ready to cancel amnesty days outright.
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By Monday, that had changed.
Presented with a formal motion to end amnesty days without introducing a voucher system, councillors appeared to decide they actually liked the idea of having something like vouchers as a replacement.
Some councillors turned up for the meeting thinking they were voting to replace amnesty days with vouchers, but the motion simply called for the end of amnesty days without any mention of a voucher system.
“Obviously, there’s a few of us confused about it,” said councillor Steve Payne. “Everybody that I talked to in the public, that’s what we were pretty-much selling them at the time.”
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Garett Cochrane, Stacie Arden-Smith and Rob Foote all said on Monday they were interested in some form of voucher system being installed as an amnesty day replacement.
In July, staff had suggested giving every household on the existing waste cart system two vouchers a year that would act as a replacement for amnesty days.
Mayor Ben Hendriksen said he would prefer to scrap amnesty days outright – without vouchers – and see how that goes, then bring in vouchers if they turn out to be necessary, for example because illegal dumping worsens.
However, he conceded on Monday he was “definitely in a minority” in advocating for that approach.
Council ended up unanimously passing a motion to send the issue back to its governance and priorities committee for more work on how a voucher system might look.
