Written by Finding itself in fiscal distress, the city of Marion is faced with some difficult choices, being pressured by the Ohio Auditor of State to either fix the financial mess on their own or else the state of Ohio will take over management of the city.
Among the city’s fiscal challenges is an $8.9 million dollar budget deficit spread out across fourteen of the city’s funds.
One of those funds suffering from a budget shortfall is Sanitation.
At the end of 2025, the city of Marion’s Department of Sanitation had a negative fund balance of $407,877 and annual expenditures of $3,277,723.
Sanitation, which provides garbage collection and recycling services to both residential and commercial customers within the city, was set up to operate like a business. As a business enterprise, it is supposed to generate sufficient revenues from service fees to cover its expenses. It should NOT operate at a deficit or need to be bailed out by the city’s taxpayer-funded operational fund, the General Fund.
To ensure that doesn’t happen, city administrators should review budgets annually and, as necessary, increase service fees to offset inflationary cost increases.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t been done since March 2014, when the trash service fee was set at the current rate of $22 per month.
Suffice it to say, there’s been a lot of inflationary cost increases since 2014, so each year that passed without an adjustment to the service fee, Sanitation was getting further and further behind with its budget.
City leaders are now looking into ways to increase Sanitation revenues, so that its deficit can be repaid and it can operate annually at a break-even point as intended.
With the Auditor of State rejecting the plan submitted by the city in January, which featured a repayment period of twenty years for these funds with deficits, the city is now considering a ten-year repayment plan in hopes that it will be approved by the AOS.
Under the proposed plan, trash service fees will be increased, and the city’s recycling services will be eliminated.
There’s been some rumblings by some outspoken critics, who swear that the elimination of the city’s recycling services is a bridge too far.
But is it really?
The city of Marion has approximately 13,773 sanitation customers.
In 2023, it hauled away 28,976,000 lbs of refuse from city streets. However, out of that amount, a mere 998,000 lbs was recycling.
That’s only 3% of all the trash hauled away from the curb.
If you analyze the data further, as the Swamp Fox has done, the average sanitation customer in Marion recycles only 72.46 lbs of refuse per year, 6.04 lbs per month, 1.39 lbs per week, and 0.20 lbs per day.
To put that in perspective, the average 10-13 gallon trash bag holds 10-15 lbs of waste, while a standard sized 30-33 gallon trash bag can hold 20-50 lbs.
Two or three standard size trash bags would cover an entire year’s worth of recycling for the average sanitation customer in the city of Marion.
The elimination of recycling services is projected to save the city of Marion a total of $360,756 per year. If you add in the cost of new garbage truck–since they get replaced every nine years–that’s an additional $75,030 at present pricing.
From a cost perspective, recycling costs the city of Marion $0.44 for every pound of refuse that’s recycled.
If you’re still not convinced that the city’s recycling services should be eliminated, you might find some encouragement in this idea.
Recycling services could be maintained if trash service fees were increased by roughly $2.64 per month–on top of whatever the city is planning to increase them. I suspect that, based on the deficit amount and operational costs of Sanitation, the rate will likely increase from $22 to $28 per month. Add another $2.64 per month–for a grand total of $30.64 per month–and Marion could probably keep its recycling service.
On the other hand, if you’re one of the environmentally conscious types, you could always find your own private recycling alternatives and the city of Marion could get out of the recycling business altogether.