Street cleaning fees to be adjusted
02.08.2021 – Clean streets are a city's calling card. Who is responsible for cleaning them is regulated by the street cleaning statutes. In streets where Stadtwerke Offenbach's Stadtservice takes on the task, the associated fee statutes regulate how much citizens have to pay. In Offenbach, these statutes have now been regularly reviewed. They have been adapted for the period 2021 to 2023 and brought up to date legally.
City Councillor and Treasurer Martin Wilhelm and Christian Loose, Deputy Head of ESO Eigenbetrieb der Stadt Offenbach, explained the changes planned for October 1, 2021 during the City Council press conference. The city parliament must now approve the proposal.
The city is legally obliged to recalculate the fees. The result of the latest review: Where Stadtservice employees clean sidewalks and streets, the cleaning fees are to be increased by 17 percent as of October 1, 2021, bringing them back to the level of three years ago after a reduction of around 17 percent in 2018.
Fees must cover costs
These regular adjustments are necessary because fees must cover costs. In 2018, a surplus was accumulated from previous years. Any money collected in excess must be returned to citizens within five years. This has been done in Offenbach over the past three years by reducing charges. Now this so-called fee equalization provision has been used up as planned. To ensure that Stadtservice can continue to pay the street sweepers, maintain the fleet of vehicles required for cleaning and dispose of the garbage to cover its costs, the fees will be raised again to the 2018 level.
The increase will vary depending on the cleaning class of the respective street: For example, if a street is cleaned once a week by Stadtservice, residents will have to pay €7.56 more per year for seven meters of sidewalk - that's 63 cents a month. If the street sweepers come four times a week to clean 15 meters of sidewalk, they will have to pay 68.40 euros more per year - that's 5.70 euros per month. In the streets with the higher cleaning classes, the residents are mostly commercial businesses or multi-storey buildings, where the costs can be shared between several tenants by the owner.
Criteria for the classification of cleaning classes were reviewed
Streets in Offenbach are divided into cleaning classes according to a sophisticated points system. The respective criteria for awarding these points have now also been reviewed. These include, above all, the type and density of development, but also whether there are many trees there that shed flowers, leaves or bark, how busy the street is, for example because of a bus stop or a daycare center, and how dirty the street and sidewalk are in general.
Citizens whose streets are cleaned by local residents are not affected by the fee increase. Here, the homeowners themselves are responsible for ensuring that the sidewalk, gutter and street are swept regularly. The scope and nature of the cleaning obligation are made clearer in the new version of the street cleaning statutes than in the current document.
Clear regulations for cleaning residents
This means that residents' cleaning also includes the proper disposal of garbage, either in their own waste bins or, in the case of autumn leaves, at the recycling center. While it was previously only prohibited to simply sweep the autumn leaves - including those from municipal trees - in front of the property or the paper handkerchiefs lying on the sidewalk into the gutter, onto the tree grates or into the bins, this convenience is now an offense. A fine can be imposed for this.
In future, this will also apply to the use of herbicides. Anyone who illegally uses chemical mace to combat wild growth on the sidewalk or in the gutter must also expect a fine when the new bylaws come into force.
August 2, 2021