A proposed $10 increase for every hour township staff spends collecting written material for resident requests drew questioning from Coun. Herb Neher at Wellesley council on Monday night.
“We’re charging people $50 to come over the counter to ask for copies of any kind of written material. I think that that’s really excessive,” Neher said. “I think that we are here to provide services. If we’re going to start charging people for the time they spend with us and start charging them for paper, start charging them for every type of thing, I have a concern with that. I think that’s what they pay taxes for.”
The proposed increase is from $40 to $50 for every hour of staff labour, plus HST and an eight per cent administration fee.
Neher said it should be part of the township’s job to provide that type of service. He suggested adding an amendment to the fee, for example that anything over 20 pages would cost the customer or to charge per a page.
“I don’t have a problem with us charging if somebody wants to have photocopies, but as a flat $50 fee I have a problem,” Neher said. “If somebody wants to access something and it only requires us a minute or two, it’s two pieces of paper and we’re going to charge them $50, I have a real concern with that.”
Township planner Geoff Vanderbaaren agreed, advising councillors meeting March 9 that since he started working for the township he’s never charged the full fee.
“If I’m spending five or 10 minutes to gather some information together, I wouldn’t charge them for that,” Vanderbaaren said. “This is intended to cover off someone who’s put in a request to the municipality that I’m going to need to spend two or three hours to gather information for.”
He added the typical day to day requests they don’t charge for. The full list of fees and charges revisions is up for approval at the March 17 council meeting.
Treasurer Theresa Bisch said they’ve always had a charge per hour for when people come in to the finance department and need them to search their taxes back further than they can on the computer.
“It’s to cover our staff time for that. We do have that if it’s something we can’t easily access,” Bisch said.
They’re also proposing adding charges for reprints of some bills because more people aren’t keeping their paper copies.
“So it does take a lot of staff time to take care of some of these things,” Bisch said. “We do charge for certain things, but we use our judgment.”
