White Street Savings Break Down – Worth $1.73 to You?

Monetarily speaking, how much is your neighbors happiness worth to you? How about the happiness of someone that lives on the opposite side of town as you? Seriously, think about that for a minute.

Now allow me to toss out some numbers that are associated with the potential reopening of the White Street landfill (to be clear, I oppose changing its current status). It has been said that if the landfill were reopened to maximum capacity (original proposal) that the city could potentially save around $3 million a year. Granted, that number is higher or lower depending on who you ask. When people see a figure like $3 million it is human nature to think, “That is a lot of money.”

What I’d like to do is let you know how that figure would impact you directly. In an effort to do so I reached out to someone in the Budget Department yesterday and tried to find a relatively simple way to break that figure down. As it turns out, doing so by population size (we simply used 260,000) and property tax rate is the easiest way to do so. Here is how the numbers break down:

• $3,000,000 in savings / 260,000 people = $11.58 per person a year
• $3,000,000 in savings would reduce the property tax rate by 1.25 cents. Meaning that a person owning a $100,000 home would save $12.50 per year on their property taxes

The new White Street proposal is to haul 50,000 tons to the landfill which would result in a savings of $450,000 per year (according to what has been reported). If you break that down per citizen, it saves each person in Greensboro $1.73.

Given the uproar that reopening this landfill will cause and the negative impact that it could possibly have on a chunk of Greensboro’s residents and economy… is that really worth $1.73 to you?

Note: Numbers were provided by the budget department and are very high level. I’m sure this could be broken down multiple ways, but my goal was to do this in a way that was easy to understand.