Lexington residents are slated to vote on part of the town’s new waste removal plan during a special election June 16.
More specifically, residents will vote on whether the Select Board can charge residents a fee for disposing of more than a baseline volume of waste. That volume has not yet been decided because the town is still conducting outreach to determine what size trash barrels residents prefer.
This referendum vote comes almost two months after Town Meeting passed Article 31, amending the town’s trash bylaw to allow for a fee, with about 70 percent support. Opposers gathered more than double the necessary amount of signatures to have a referendum on Article 31 only a few days later.
Supporters of Article 31 argue it will help the town save money and help the environment by incentivising residents to throw out less trash.
“Less trash means less money spent on trash collection, and that’s especially important given the fact that the cost of everything is increasing right now,” Avram Baskin, a Town Meeting member from precinct 2, told the Observer.
Opposers say they’re against passing the motion for similar reasons. They argue it will make the town more expensive.
“We all agree on the desirability of waste reduction. But we need a plan that imposes no extra costs on citizens,” resident Alan Seferian told LexObserver for an earlier story on Article 31 over email.
In reality, the current system is paid for by the tax levy. The cost of removing waste from Lexington (and all other municipalities, for that matter) is increasing. Therefore, the cost to tax-payers is also increasing — though it feels like less of a direct cost because it comes out of the tax levy. The new system would incentivise residents to throw out less waste by charging residents a fee if they throw out more than baseline volume. The idea is if the total tonnage of waste reduces, the fees Lexington pays to throw out waste will reduce, and therefore the cost residents pay to throw out waste through the tax levy will reduce. But, if a household needs to throw out more than the baseline, they can do so at a fee.
“This isn’t just better for the environment; it’s better for our budget,” Nicola Sykes, Town Meeting representative from precinct 8, told the Observer. “By reducing the town’s overall disposal volume, we free up tax dollars for other vital services.”
In addition to citing cost, opponents have argued the vote is premature because the town has not provided enough details on the program it would like to adopt.
“The Town should have presented a clear, detailed plan — including specific fee amounts and barrel sizes — before proposing to remove the word ‘free’ from the trash and recycling collection bylaw,” Town Meeting member from precinct 8, Andrei Rădulescu-Banu, said to the Observer for a previous story on Article 31.
Lexington’s plan going into Town Meeting’s annual session this spring was to see if the precinct reps would vote in favor of buying new uniform barrels and allowing the town to impose the fee, and then finish conducting public outreach to determine what size barrels to get, Maggie Peard, Lexington’s sustainability and resilience officer, told the Observer.
As a result of that strategy, details such as the size of bins and the fee amount are undetermined, leaving some Town Meeting members on the fence and residents in online forums confused about how to vote.
But Lexington isn’t reinventing the wheel here.
Under Lexington’s current waste removal plan, enrolled residents can use just about any (and as many) bins they want and workers in a trash truck manually haul away their waste weekly.
The town wants to move to a plan that includes getting each household one standardized garbage barrel. Those toters will be compatible with automatic trash removal trucks that have a robotic arm to pick up barrels and dump waste into them without any manual labor.
Many Massachusetts communities, including Woburn, Braintree, Wakefield, Andover, and Arlington, have already made the switch from a similar plan to a similar plan.
Arlington switched to an automatic waste removal plan where all residents get one 65-gallon trash barrel and one 65-gallon recycling barrel in July 2025. The town bought a handful of 35-gallon bins for households that prefer the smaller carts. And families that produce more trash or recycling can lease additional carts from the town for between $145 and $200 per cart per year.
“We are seeing a reduction in tonnage in both solid waste and single stream recycling,” Arlington Town Manager Jim Feeney (no relation to LexObserver’s editor, Lauren Feeney) told the Observer.
Almost a year later, Arlington disposed of about 16 percent less waste in fiscal year 2026 than it did in FY25 when comparing the same ten-month period (July to April), Feeney said. Adjusted to the current cost of trash disposal, Arlington has saved about $130,000 on waste removal this fiscal year, Feeney explained. Arlington’s recycling tonnage is down nine percent.
There was a bit of a learning curve for residents right after the new bins were rolled out, Feeney said. Residents have to make sure they position the new toters by the curb correctly — three feet apart so the robotic arm can successfully grab the barrel.
“Once everyone was situated with the right size and right number of carts, folks were largely happy,” the Town Manager said.
Other global communities have long used more restrictive waste removal programs.
In South Korea, for example, when landfills in Seoul started to reach their limits in the late 1990s, the government implemented a whole bunch of policies to mitigate the waste crisis.
Universal curbside composting was implemented in 2013, requiring everyone to separate their food from general waste and charging a fee per bag of waste. In 1996, South Korea recycled just 2.6 percent of its food waste. Today, the country recycles close to 100 percent annually.
Peard noted most communities around Lexington are moving toward automated waste removal programs to ease costs and reduce waste removal tonnage. Feeney argued this is the direction in which the world is going.
If Lexington adopts a waste removal program similar to Arlington’s, it could see similar results. But first, it will have to pass Article 31 at the town-wide election on June 16 — which comes as its own cost.
Holding town elections costs Lexington tens of thousands of dollars. The annual election in March cost the town about $43,600. This election will cost Lexington about the same amount, save some warrant printing costs because there will only be one item on the ballot, Town Clerk Mary de Alderete explained to the Observer.
Come election day, if you would like to vote in favor of allowing the town to charge residents a fee for excess waste, choose “yes.” If you would like to vote against the change, vote “no.”
The deadline to register to vote in time for the June 16 special election is 5 p.m. on June 5. The deadline to apply to vote by a mail-in ballot in this special election is 5 p.m. on June 9. There will be no early voting in this election. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. on June 16.
A scientific analysis of our local lawn signs (The Trash Fee Edition) 🗑️🏡
Has anyone else noticed that our current lawn sign landscape functions as a handy property appraisal tool?
I’ve been doing some highly unscientific neighborhood data collection ahead of the June 16th special election on Article 31. The correlation is fascinating: the larger the square footage of the house, the more fiercely the lawn sign screams “VOTE NO to the trash fee!” Meanwhile, the more modest cape homes seem quite content with a “VOTE YES.”
It feels like a very modern twist on classic suburban anxiety. We all passionately agree that protecting the environment and reducing waste is a noble, vital goal… right up until it threatens our right to throw away three couches, an old trampoline, and four Amazon boxes of packing peanuts in a single week without paying an extra $5.
Look, I get it. The town hasn’t finalized the exact barrel sizes yet, and the fear of the unknown is real. But our neighbors in Arlington made the switch, reduced their trash by 16%, and saved $130,000 in a year. Is the robotic arm on an automated trash truck really the hill we want to die on?
If your mansion is producing enough weekly refuse to bankrupt you under a baseline trash quota, maybe the issue isn’t the town fee—maybe it’s the sheer volume of stuff we’re all consuming.
Let’s look on the bright side: if the “Vote No” crowd wins, at least the wealthy homes will have plenty of room in their unlimited bins to throw away all those giant plastic lawn signs on June 17th. Free of charge, of course! 😉
See you at the polls on June 16th—don’t forget to register by June 5th!
I will be voting NO and am strongly opposed to new trash fees. At the same time I support automated collection which will save the town $$ millions of dollars $$. The LexObserver headline for this article is misleading at best. The town will not be voting on automated collection, just on the ability of the town to collect fees. The town already has plans to move toward with automated collection regardless of what happens with this vote and this will yield big cost savings. Stated another way, trash fees aren’t necessary in order to implement an automated collection program. So, it’s misleading to say that Lexington won’t be able to control it’s trash costs if this vote doesn’t pass.
Further, automated collection costs are driven more by # of households and route density as opposed to bin size and number of bins. That means the town doesn’t need to drastically reduce it’s baseline service to realize big cost savings.
You are right that automation will likely be happening regardless of how this referendum turns out. (The No campaign doesn’t seem to acknowledge this, telling people to vote No if they are happy with the current system and don’t want it to change. It will change.) The question is, how will automation work if the town does not have the authority to charge fees for trash beyond one barrel? Does each house get as many barrels as it wants, at taxpayer expense? Should a house that puts out 3 barrels pay the same as the majority of households, who put out 1? Or will there be a strict limit of 1 barrel, with no mechanism for collection of excess trash at all? (If fees are not allowed, it may not be possible to allow excess bags beyond your bin for household that only occasionally have excess trash. Fees allow the town to sell excess collection bags for a few bucks each, like other towns do. Hard to do excess bags for free, since that’s manual collection, which the haulers will likely no longer do.) If we preclude fees, while switching to automation, we may wind up with strict limits to make the system work, which I don’t think anyone wants.
As part of the transition to automated collection, the town will be giving a trash bin to every household. It will thus have to decide how to respond to requests for a second bin. The most natural option is to charge a fee. If the town is not permitted to do that, then the most straightforward remaining option would be to limit all households to one bin.
Automated collection trucks are capable of picking up more than one bin per household. Lexington will have this flexibility even without charging fees. The town can also standardize on a larger bin such as 64 gallons.
Are there specific reasons you would be against putting pressure on all of us to reduce trash production? It seems like paying extra for more individual trash production is a pretty simple and reasonable solution. What I am getting at simply is whether we should all be thoughtful about how much trash we produce, or we should not have limitations on how much trash we produce?
I will vote NO (https://notrashfees.com/) on Tuesday, June 16 because it makes no sense for our Town leaders to seek to collect in the order of an extra $1 million per year in trash fees when they ignore possible
– savings of $3 million per year, or 3 times more, with new elementary school assignment policies to fill our elementary classrooms to “preferred” levels (several dozen classrooms are now well below that level), and
– new revenues of $15 million per year, or 15 times more, by getting rental apartment complexes to pay in taxes per sq ft 85% instead of 36% as they now pay of what single-family houses pay per sq ft (https://tinyurl.com/lexbudgetMBTA).
And the same Town leaders who made the disastrous decision in 2023 to zone 227 acres for MBTA developments (like now, without any prior study) certainly do not deserve a blank check BEFORE they do the necessary studies and tell us the size of the free trash bins and the proposed fees for additional trash.
I have not heard $1 million pitched as an expected figure for the fees; are you deriving that from something in particular?
Yes, but my (authoritative, as someone who used to be a highly placed elected Town official for many years) source has asked me to keep her/his name private.
Plus you can do the math yourself. Assume (a complete guess on my part) that 1/3 of households, or 4,000, pay a fee every other week, or 26 times per year. Further assume that the fee (another complete guess) is $10: you get $10 x 4,000 x 26 = $1,040,000 per year.
And I doubt the Town can justify the cost of picking up 1 additional barrel to be as high as $10…
I live next to Bedford which seems to have a similar system to what the Yes folks are envisioning. The recycling bin is larger than the trash bin which I’m guessing is about 45 gal. When I walk the neighborhood, I rarely see more than 1 household out of 15-20 with a bag in addition to the trash bin. I think the bags cost around $3. That sure won’t bring in $1 million!
I am voting NO for many reasons, among them because it’s indeed not worth to make 1,000s of households waste time to get tags (or whatever system would be set up to charge such minuscule trash fees) for the Town to collect less than $1 million per year. Not efficient, and we are all busy enough to not have to be bothered for so little money.
Setting aside this vote. Would you fundamentally support forcing people to pay more for producing excessive trash in some way through fees? Just curious where yes/no proponents stand on this.
Mlexster:
If the Select Board demonstrates to us that it is now more responsible than in 2023 when it foolishly supported zoning 227 acres for MBTA developments WITHOUT having done any prior analyses (except to accept the Planning Board’s unsubstantiated and ludicrous “227 acres will generate 800 new dwellings in 5-10 years”) — which it has NOT yet done — by:
(1) figuring out how to end the huge tax breaks owners of rental apartment complexes now get by paying per sq ft only 36% in taxes of what single-family houses pay, which will generate 15 times for the Town ($15 million per year per https://tinyurl.com/lexbudgetMBTA) what trash fees would generate; and
(2) ending the Schools’ waste of 3 times ($3 million per year per https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JiIMtzKMew1jutuhqLFgNM8SOdZpm_d8/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116971253884586510151&rtpof=true&sd=true) what trash fees would generate by getting the Schools to fill our elementary classrooms to the “preferred” level, as approved by the School Committee and the unions; and
(3) first doing, BEFORE asking for any change, a full study of what the baseline, free, trash amount will be and what fees will be for households producing more than the baseline; and
(4) proposing a modern, online (as opposed to having to buy physical tags) system to collect those fees, then
yes, as a fanatic recycler who produces peanuts trash weekly, I would wholeheartedly support such a mechanism to encourage more residents to be as fanatic as I already am.
But right now, I will vote NO https://notrashfees.com/ because our Select Board, having done none of (1), (2), (3) and (4) is still as irresponsible as it was in 2023 when it supported zoning 227 acres for MBTA developments without any serious prior homework done.
I recently moved from Arlington and am voting NO. Where did the 15% of trash and recyclables not collected go? Growing use of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic surely contributed to less food and food packaging waste, but the rest doesn’t simply disappear – it has to go somewhere. Some might dispose more at workplaces, along with using more water at work for hygiene than at home.
Other trash gets diverted to FaceBook Marketplace, overflowing donation bins, illegal dumping, and using public bins.
The trash truck grappler arms simply can’t be used much in Arlington because parked cars block access to many bins and the difficulty of 3′ spacing when there are a dozen or more bins outside an apartment building, however the tipping lift at the hopper once the barrels are rolled there are a great aid, allowing for greater employment of women in the industry.
Bottom line is that people don’t want to lose more time in their day for trash. Time lost to commute with inadequate road capacities is already too much burden on taxpayers. I hoped that the lower density of Lexington would reduce city initiatives, so I’m voting NO to preserve the quality of life in my new home.
The idea that there will be “less trash”when you charge people more, is ludicrous. Anyone who lived in Lexington in the days of trash bag fees and bag tags, knows that people would do anything to avoid paying the fees.
They would bring trash to work, throw it in dumpsters behind businesses, and my jobsite dumpsters would be full of household “pirate” trash regularly. And worse even, toss it out the car!
“Free” trash collection assures a clean town, and promotes honesty.
Im very dissapointed in the town meeting fir revisiting this failed policy
Trash disposal costs are rising significantly and therefore consuming an increasing proportion of our tax dollars. To contain costs, Lexington needs to do two things: (1) move to automated trash collection, which can and will happen regardless of our vote next week, and (2) reduce the volume of trash we throw away. Town Meeting voted for a change that will enable us to shift to a system where residents pay a reasonable fee for trash in excess of a generous amount (equal to what a majority of households currently throw away) — and the Select Board has committed to fee waivers to assist people with disabilities or other circumstances that could make fees a burden. This is a proven method of motivating people to reduce trash disposal by reducing waste and increasing recycling and composting.
Change is going to happen no matter how we vote. We will almost certainly shift to automated trash collection. If we vote no, trash disposal costs will continue to rise or the town will find other ways (that might be more burdensome) to reduce trash disposal. Voting yes gives us a reasonable mechanism to contain trash disposal costs, be fiscally responsible, and avoid burdening other communities with our trash. I urge a yes vote.
Think about this.
Is there any Lexington service that directly impacts each of our weekly lives more than trash removal service? This makes it a third rail for politics in town.
To all the Kevins and Karens pushing for new regulations and costs (read controls) on households, claiming voting yes will result in $300k-$500k of savings a year, here’s a thought:
How much money could be saved by eliminating NIYBY (not in YOUR backyard) positions in Lexington’s town government, such as,
1. Tree Warden (completely useless, there are roughly 1.3 million trees in Lexington)
2. Sustainability and Resilience Officer (obviously incompetent, as evidenced by a special election being triggered by this controversy)
3. Clinical Engagement and Community Equity Officer, assistant and DEI consultants (blatantly discriminatory and illegal)
I bet eliminating these positions and related spending would save $1M or more annually.
Another way to look at this from a fairness perspective. The number of people in a household is likely the strongest predictor of trash volume produced. The amount of taxes paid per household has nothing to do with the number of people living there, it is simply a ratio of the value of the property. Therefore, highly valued properties already pay more for trash removal in actual dollars than lesser valued properties. IOW, just like the federal tax system, Lexington property taxes are already progressive with respect to trash costs.
So please vote NO to more spending and intrusions in our weekly lives. The almost billion dollar High School override boondoggle should have been enough mischief to cover at least a decade worth of socialist desires, in my humble opinion.
The word “socialist” has come up in these comments, intended, I think, in a derogatory way. If what is meant by that is that it’s undesirable for the town government to spend taxpayer dollars on programs and services, then in what respect is Lexington’s convenient, taxpayer-funded trash collection service not already “socialism”? And how will a fee on *excess* trash make it *more* “socialist”? Those concerned about socialism may want to look to the example of Sudbury. Residents there are expected to take nearly total responsibility for the disposal of their waste. Residents can bring their trash, recycling, and other waste to the town’s transfer station—for a fee—or they can hire a private company for curbside service. It’s hard to get less “socialist” than that!
David A. Simons:
The Town’s Maggie Peard informed me that an audit of the trash put out by some 1,400 households (out of 12,000 households in Lexington) in the spring of 2025, led by Town staff with support from volunteers, showed that the top 10% of those households produced as much trash as the bottom 50% of those same households.
To simplify, if instead of 12,000 households, Lexington had just 10 households putting out the following amounts of trash
1 50 lbs of trash
2 40 lbs
3 40 lbs
4 40 lbs
5 40 lbs
6 10 lbs
7 10 lbs
8 10 lbs
9 10 lbs
10 10 lbs
the total for the 10 households would be 50 + 4×40 + 5×10 = 260 lbs of trash (of which 50% is 130 lbs).
So YES, the top 10%, i.e. the 1 household producing 50 lbs of trash, produces as much as the 50% bottom producers, the 5 households who each produce 10 lbs each.
But NO, that 10% of households, the top 1 producing 50 lbs of trash, is VERY FAR from producing 50% of the 260 lbs of TOTAL trash, or 130 lbs, as many YES campaign supporters have said publicly without anyone from that campaign ever acknowledging the misinformation the YES campaign has been circulating.
With 6,700 students in our schools, and — if my memory serves me well –, 1.6 kids on average per household with at least 1 kid in that household, 6,700/1.6 or 4,200 households are responsible for our total school enrollment and 12,000 – 4,200 or 7,800 send no kids (each student costs the Town $29,000 per year to educate) to our schools. So 35% of all Lexington households “cost” the Town our whole school budget, which is 80% of the Town’s total $320 million or so annual budget, and 65% of households cost nothing school-wise.
As an empty nester, I am now part of the 65% of households, but I gladly see 80% of my $19,000 in annual taxes help pay for those 35% of Lexington families.
Similarly, to avoid 1,000s of people the annoyance of buying tags, etc for the Town to collect a minuscule extra $1 million per year in trash fees, and as someone who recycles fanatically and produces only 1 13 gallon white bag of trash per week, I will vote NO on June 16 because I will gladly continue to do for trash what 65% of Lexington residents do for our Schools — pay for them, even though they have no kids in the schools. Economists call this “socializing” costs.
Why are some things socialized and not others? Sometimes there’s a reason, and sometimes it’s a historical accident: https://tmmalex.groups.io/g/TMMAList/message/2296
But if you want to get into economic theory about it, I think the relevant terms are positive or negative externalities, and the tragedy of the commons.
Education is a classic positive externality, which makes socializing it a good idea: Forcing everybody to pay for their own education causes some people not to receive education because they either don’t think it’s worth the cost or simply can’t afford it, even if everybody would be better off if they got that education. The problem is doubly pernicious with primary and secondary education because the would-be student isn’t even the one who makes the decision!
That’s not true of trash. Trash does not go out into the world to spread joy and understanding. All things being equal, less trash is good, and more trash is bad. Of course, trash is a necessary byproduct of many beneficial activities, and so we don’t just say “no trash for anyone.” But we do already make commercial entities pay for the cost of their trash disposal, because it’s something we’d really like them to price into whatever they’re doing, rather than passing it on to everyone else.
Economists generally assume incentives matter, at least some of the time. And prices are one of the simpler ways to add incentives for a behavior. Oh, those economists…
benjaminlees:
I agree 500% with everything you wrote — which economists know well.
As a fanatical recycler who produces less than a single 13-gallon kitchen bag of trash per week, I will vote NO on Tuesday because:
(1) the Select Board has offered no details on the proposed trash fee, nor the free baseline, except to acknowledge, as State law mandates, that the fee will cover the true cost of collecting the extra trash beyond the (unknown) baseline, and not more. But what if, being as “reasonable” as in April 2023 when it thought (based on no data analysis whatsoever) that the right acreage to zone for dense MBTA developments was 227 acres, the Select Board decides (after a YES win Tuesday) that the fee is $100 per extra barrel per week but I think the true cost is only $2? Then my only recourse is to sue the Town, at a cost of several $10,000s. I am not willing to give this Select Board any blank check, after its April 2023 support of the disastrous 227 acres.
(2) The Town has indicated that the trash fees (even though not yet set) would in aggregate add $1 million per year in revenues for the Town. Since the Select Board, if it had its priorities right, could get the Schools to stop wasting $3 million each year by properly filling our elementary classrooms, and could make owners of rental apartment complexes like AvalonBay pay $15 million more in taxes each year if it fixed the “36% problem” (cell AF2 in tab 2 of https://tinyurl.com/lexbudgetMBTA), I see no reason to inconvenience thousands of households for a minuscule $1 million (our total budget is $320 per year) while far larger money-saving opportunities are ignored, especially since
(3) no method to pay the trash fee has been announced — tags, app of some sort, or what? We are all busy so I don’t want to have to call someone on Town staff to find out where and how I can pay my $100 — or hopefully $2… 😉 — for a tag.
I will support a trash fee program once one is fully described to us, and after the Select Board addresses far more urgent financial opportunities for the Town, including the $3 million and $15 million ones mentioned above.
The current trash fee proposal puts the cart before the horse and deserves a NO vote on Tuesday.
1) From what I’ve seen, our town doesn’t lack people willing to commit money to litigation. That said, you’d also have the recourse of voting for someone else to be on the select board, or running again yourself. The 2025 election results suggest most people didn’t share your assessment of the select board back then, but if the select board behaves capriciously, it should become really easy to beat one of the members next time.
2) I still don’t believe the town has provided any such estimate, except the one you described through your anonymous former town official (now in witness protection). But if it really turns out to be $1 million in the first year, that’d be nice to have, and it’d tide us over while the town is busy implementing your ideas.
3) It sounds like one-off bags will be available for purchase at both town buildings and retailers. For the annual fee for an extra bin, I’m confident the town will make it easy for you to give them money if you feel the need, especially if they’re hoping to raise $1 million!
Defend democracy! The Selectboard needs to put non-binding ballot questions on the next local election asking voters what they want, and getting the most accurate feedback possible direct from voters. If this had been done prior to the Town Meeting warrant article on trash fees, the added cost and efforts of having a special election would have been saved. Elected officials, please don’t make that mistake again! It just takes a simple passing vote ahead of time to put ballot questions on the next local ballot, with no added cost to taxpayers.