Ravenna council delayed a vote on raising prices for recycling services

Ravenna City Council postponed a vote to raise the price of recycling pickup service on Tuesday night, with some members concerned the public has not been adequately consulted on the changes.

The Portage County Solid Waste Removal District, which serves Ravenna and several other municipalities in Portage County, increased the fee for recycling pickup to $5.50 a month, and Ravenna’s city council must agree to this increase if residents are to continue receiving service.

Ward 2 Council Member Robert Kairis raised concerns about holding the vote.

“I think this [vote] is being rushed through,” Kairis said. “I know we have discussed it, but it hasn’t been passed through the normal channels. How many people in our community don’t know about this because it hasn’t been, in my opinion, properly vetted.”

Council-at-large Member Cheryl Wood disagreed, recalling that she spoke with Fox 8 News about the price increase in March and gave out her phone number asking for members of the community to reach out. 

“A couple weeks later I was up to about 100 calls and many texts and emails,” Wood said. “[The recycling charge increase] has been discussed, and we have been out there trying to get the public’s opinion.”

The vote on the recycling increase was an emergency vote, meaning that five of the council’s seven members needed to vote to approve it. Only five members were in session at Tuesday night’s meeting, so Kairis’ disagreement was enough to stall its passage. He was eventually joined by two other council members in voting to delay a decision.

The members of the public in attendance at the meeting seemed to generally agree with the notion that they were not adequately informed and that the vote should be postponed.

“I spoke with two residents on the phone today who did not know this [vote] was happening until today,” Ward 3 Council Member Matt Harper said. “As a city we do need to do a better job of getting this information to the residents.”

He was met with applause from some members of the public.

Council President Andrew Kluge said after the meeting that the ordinance will be discussed in the council’s committee meeting on Monday.

It now appears that the next step for the vote will be for the council to solicit more feedback from residents about the new recycling terms.

“The customers that were there voiced their displeasure with the increase in recycling,” Kluge said. “So what we are going to do in the next couple of weeks is hold these neighborhood meetings. We’ve already got four of them [planned].”

The first community meeting will be for Ward 2 on July 14, and Kluge said the council would consider trying to make that a larger meeting for the whole community to discuss the recycling increase.

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Owen MacMillan is a reporter with the Collaborative News Lab @ Kent State University, producing local news coverage in partnership with The Portager.