SLO County CSD pays residents’ trash bills for holidays. ‘We want it to benefit our community’
Nipomo residents are getting an early holiday gift: no garbage bills through the holiday season.
This week, mailers were sent to the Nipomo Community Services District’s roughly 4,100 customers, informing them that no garbage collection bill would be charged in the months of December and January.
Newly-appointed Nipomo CSD general manager Ray Dienzo said the NCSD board voted unanimously to waive the bills at its Oct. 11 meeting as a way to return surplus funds to the community.
Dienzo said there’s some precedent for waiving garbage bills; Nipomo CSD has waived bill collection for solid waste twice in recent years, cutting holiday bills in 2015 and 2020.
This year, Dienzo said the surplus was “a product of efficient service, fiscal responsibility and goodwill,” amounting to a total of $320,000.
The solid waste fund — which comes from the South County Sanitary Services’ payments to the Nipomo CSD for garbage pickup — is used to fund the community’s trash cans, organized cleanups, cleaning up illegal trash dumps and large solid waste disposal, Dienzo said.
A standard garbage collection bill costs $38 each month, meaning Nipomo residents will save $78 over the next two months, Dienzo said.
“Instead of letting the reserves build up, let’s use it to benefit our customer base,” Dienzo said. “It’s actually a policy that our board made that we don’t let these reserves go up, that we want it to benefit our community.”
This story was originally published November 22, 2023 at 2:30 PM.
