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HARPER WOODS/GROSSE POINTES — At a time when seemingly everything else is more expensive, the Grosse Pointes-Clinton Refuse Disposal Authority is holding the line on at least one cost.
A $3 per ton of trash administrative fee paid by each member community — the five Grosse Pointes and Harper Woods — will remain the same for the 2026 to 2027 fiscal year, which starts July 1. The fee was approved as part of approval of a budget for the new fiscal year, with the GPCRDA Board voting unanimously in favor of the budget during a meeting May 12 in Harper Woods.
“We’re still maintaining our $3 administrative fee, which is handling all of our administrative (expenses),” said CPA Lynn Gromaski, who handles the finances for the GPCRDA, after the meeting.
And the GPCRDA is able to keep the same rate even though tonnage rates have been lower than anticipated for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year, meaning that the administrative fee revenue is lower as well.
The budget of $854,650 is less than last year’s budget of just over $1 million in part because of what Gromaski said were the “more favorable” rates that the GPCRDA negotiated in 2025 to take trash to the J. Fons Co. transfer station in Detroit, which is owned by Priority Waste. Member communities had been taking their trash to the South Macomb Disposal Authority transfer station in Roseville, and while they were pleased with the service they received, the J. Fons bid was $4.96 per ton lower than what the GPCRDA was paying to SMDA.
“It’s status quo,” GPCRDA Chair Michael Way said of the budget after the meeting. “There’s not much changing.”
The budget includes a contribution of $14,750 for the pension system, which covers employees who used to work at the GPCRDA’s former incinerator in Clinton Township. The incinerator ceased operations in 1999 and was torn down in 2001. Gromaski said there are fewer than 10 employees who remain on the pension.
For the 2025 to 2026 budget cycle, the budget included a pension contribution of $24,750 and ended up only needing to make a payment of $14,750. It won’t be known until later in July — after the new fiscal year starts — whether they need to pay into the pension.
“We just wait each year to see if we need to make a payment,” Gromaski said.
The administrative fee has now been stable for almost a decade. On July 1, 2017, a higher administrative fee — which rose from $1 per ton of trash to $3 per ton — went into effect for the member communities, because the old fee was no longer covering expenses such as insurance and contributions to the pension system.
Way said the GPCRDA greatly benefits from Gromaski’s financial knowledge.
“Lynn always does a great job, and we’re grateful to have her as our financial accountant,” Way said.
