San Luis Obispo residents and their city took a hit to the pocketbook. The City Council raised garbage rates, and SLO will have to fork out $57,130 in fines to pay for dumping tens of thousands of gallons of sewage into local creeks.
The Central Coast Water Board fined the city for dumping 43,000 gallons of sewage into local creeks in the last three years.
The City Council voted unanimously at its Oct.19 meeting to raise garbage rates by 4.62 percent. The upward movement, according to city documents, was mostly due to a $5-per-ton fee hike for solid waste haulers at the Cold Canyon Landfill, a fee increase approved by the SLO County supervisors in June.
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2011.