TBILISI, DFWatch — Tbilisi City Hall has started a process that could lead to a controversial mechanism being abolished involving the garbage collection fee being tied to the electric bill.

The system was introduced in late 2011, and is one of the most controversial decisions made by authorities in the capital. It makes the garbage fee of each household proportional to its electricity consumption.

Koki Ionatamishvili, National Movement representative in the Tbilisi Council, stated today that City Hall has started working out several models for how to separate the garbage fee from the electricity bill.

The election program of the ruling party included 1 000 lari vouchers for every family to cover communal fees for the next four years.

As long as the voucher program has not come into force, Tbilisi City Hall started to find an alternative model to separate the fees, Ionatamishvili explains.

He said an alternative scheme will become public in a few days and the Council will review it by the end of the month at a council session, but no further details are known.

By the end of 2011, a new regulation came to force, by which trash fee was calculated according to how much electricity each family had used.

This resulted in a doubling of the monthly garbage fees for the population in capital.

The problem has been one of the top local issues in a number of NDI surveys conducted in 2012.

https://dfwatch.net/u-s-democrats-present-their-survey-of-georgian-mood-48890

https://dfwatch.net/ndi-surveyed-public-attitudes-in-georgia-76637