EDITOR’S NOTE: 11:20 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 5 – The story was updated with election results.

Along with electing city council members, Saint Paul residents voted “yes” on a garbage referendum to keep Ordinance 18-39 on Tuesday.

Tuesday’s results show that 62.53% of St. Paul voters decided to keep the current garbage collection system by voting “yes” on Ordinance 18-39, which is titled “Residential Coordinated Collection.”

Ordinance 18-39 creates rules for trash service payments in addition to trash collection and disposal. Under this ordinance, certain residential dwellings are required to have trash collected from a designated trash hauler. This ordinance affects more than 73,000 1-4 unit residential St. Paul properties, according to the St. Paul government website.

Along with the trash ordinance, Mitra Jalali Nelson was re-elected for Ward 4, which is the district St. Thomas is in. It will be her first full four-year term on St. Paul City Council.

Voters’ thoughts on trash referendum
Some St. Paul residents, including St. Thomas students, went out to vote on the issue Tuesday afternoon at McNeely Hall on the University of St. Thomas campus.

“If you vote yes, we keep the contract. Everything’s the same as what it is now. And I understand not everybody’s happy,” said Eileen Brinkman, St. Paul resident. “But if you vote no, everything, everything stays the same, except that and online they said the cost of the trash collection may be put on all of the taxpayers evenly, which is not fair to anybody. So that’s why I voted ‘yes.’”

Anders Hanhan lives in both Minneapolis and St. Paul and said the Minneapolis system works really well.

“The St. Paul agreement was not negotiated very fairly,” Hanhan said. “My dad owns a duplex in this neighborhood. And they don’t allow him to have his two units share. So he’s paying for twice as much or maybe even three times as much garbage as he needs. And they don’t have any way to change that. So I think it’s a really great idea, but I think it needs to be really re-negotiated.”

St. Thomas student Clayton Cloutier has a duplex in St. Paul.

“I guess I don’t have too much of an opinion on it,” Cloutier said. “We have three trash cans and one recycling for us and the people that live upstairs, but there’s not really any rhyme or reason to what we put in what.”

St. Paul resident Laura Mudrak is concerned about the threat of property tax increase which made her want to vote “no.”

“I fully supported a no vote, except for that I voted yes,” said Mudrak. “Instead, I’m being satisfied that I voted against the incumbent and the City Council who supported the increase in the property taxes to support the contract.”

Mudrak feels that there are many issues with the contract, such as not including an opt-out, not rewarding reduced trash and not allowing residents to share carts.

“People should be able to cart share and duplexes or apartment buildings shouldn’t be able to have dumpsters and not these plastic bins. And I don’t think there’s much thought into what will happen to the old bins,” Mudrak said. “As far as I know, they got piled up on some lot and eventually landfilled, that made me mad. That was another ecological boondoggle with the whole thing.”

As a small business owner, Mudrak was not happy when the city went from 15 garbage haulers to six.

“I’m really mad about that issue and that these are bigger haulers who aren’t even in our city,” Mudrak said. “The whole idea about being more green and having one truck is a good idea. But the way that they pursued the contract was so bad.”

Mudrak signed a petition asking the city to reconsider the changes. Mudrak said there were over 5,000 signatures.

“It is a disappointment that I voted yes. I just can’t afford the property tax increase,” Mudrak said. “That was a very disappointing and maddening vote.”

Rachel Torralba can be reached at torr3544@stthomas.edu.
Samantha HoangLong contributed to this report.