Written by At this point The Swamp Fox may as well change his name to The Sanitation Fox. He’s been digging into the garbage, big time.
Although he couldn’t track down the revenues received by Marion’s Sanitation Department for each year between 2017 and 2025, he was able to locate the expenditures for those years–as well as the budgeted amounts for 2026.
As you can see, there was a substantial increase beginning in 2018.
Keep in mind, on the revenue side, trash service fees haven’t increased since 2014, so that side of the ledger should have remained fairly stagnant, since the city’s population actually declined slightly.
The Sanitation Fox was able, however, to locate revenue data for several of those years, including 2023.
In 2023, Sanitation spent $3,071,446 but only brought in $2,460,670. That’s a loss of $610,776 in one year!
With stagnant service fee rates, which are currently set at $22 per month, 2024 and 2025 were probably similar.
As mentioned in his previous article on this topic, Sanitation is a business enterprise that is conducted by the city of Marion. As such, it is supposed to operate at a break-even point, and service fees are supposed to cover all costs of the venture.
Obviously, that hasn’t been happening–since the city hasn’t increased service fees in over a decade.
If you look at where the money is going, suffice it to say that about 50% of Sanitation’s costs go toward salaries and benefits.
If the city of Marion is going to continue to engage in this business venture, it needs to start running it like a business. Service fees need to be evaluated annually to ensure that they’re sufficient to cover all costs. Department management and city leaders need to make sure, also, that the department operates efficiently, so that service fee increases can be held to a minimum.
However, if the city cannot do this, perhaps it is time to consider the privatization of sanitation in the city of Marion.
Many cities in Ohio have privatized sanitation, so it wouldn’t be an outrageous notion.