City council pulled back on a plan to allow extra garbage at the curb.
During Monday night's meeting, council voted 5-4 against a bylaw to begin a year-long pilot project where excess garbage identified with a $3 tag from the city would be picked up as part of the weekly curbside collection.
Council voted unanimously in favour of developing the bylaw based off of the information provided by parks and solid waste manager Flavio Viola on Feb. 18.
"I'm leaning towards sober second thought," said Coun. Dave Wilbur, who cited the potential for Workers' Compensation Board injury claims and concerns raised by community groups.
One of those groups was the Northern Bear Awareness Society.
"We think this is a step backwards in any attempts to reduce wildlife-human conflict from birds to bears," said a statement from society vice president Dave Bakker.
Coun. Brian Skakun spent Monday morning riding along on a garbage collection route and said he learned about a number of issues that would stem from going ahead with the plan.
While he said he had initially supported coming up with the bylaw, he now thought it would incur more costs for the city in lost time due to employee injuries and overtime paid to staff whose routes take longer by to having to get out of the automated collection trucks.
The majority of garbage in the downtown core is collected by hand and there aren't significant challenges, Coun. Cameron Stolz noted and Coun. Albert Koehler said he didn't see a problem with giving the pilot project a chance to run its course.
But ultimately the vote on the bylaw failed, with only Mayor Shari Green, and councillors Stolz, Koehler and Lyn Hall supporting it.
The garbage collection plan was one of the recommendations coming out of the core services review.
Council also knocked off another opportunity from the KPMG final report Monday night, and agreed with the city's fleet services manager that they couldn't afford to expand their maintenance services.
During Monday night's meeting, Stolz was the sole opposition to a vote to reject a core services review opportunity suggesting money could be made by performing more maintenance for non-city vehicles at the 18th Avenue Yard.
According to fleet services manager Scott Bone, the department is already at capacity and taking on more work would cost more than it brought in.
The department currently runs two shifts with eight heavy-duty and three light-duty mechanics to maintain the existing 300-vehicle fleet.
"I think unless we get on top of what we have now there is no use in looking for this pot of gold that might exist from this core review item," said Skakun, noting there were pieces of equipment that were out of commission until recently. "So I definitely support the recommendation, and if we're going to start looking for other agencies and other organizations without hiring more staff and the rest of it I think we we're going to lose ground we're not making up."
According to Bone's report to council, "the implementation of the proposed opportunity would require the construction of an additional standalone building" to complement the existing 18 service bays as well as another mechanic.
Financing a new building and an extra employee would bump up the annual cost of operations by $128,000, which Bone said would far outweigh the $16,650 that could be saved.
Bone's report also said the BC Ambulance Service is unlikely to shift its fleet maintenance services away from a local dealership due to warranties, parts and service level agreements already in place.
Hall also agreed with the staff recommendation, but said he wished council "could have expanded on this and done something with it."
Expanding the scope of the idea could have yielded some sort of benefit, argued Stolz, who questioned whether the department had looked to other agencies such as post-secondary institutions, the school district or the regional district.
I'm thinking perhaps the challenge we have with this recommendation is we were too specific," he said. "I still think there's an opportunity here."
