The Town of Essex won't be taking part in the County's new Regional Waste Management initiative.
During Monday's meeting, council voted unanimously in favour of opposing the initiative for the Town.
If council had supported the report, it would have transferred all power of the lower-tier municipalities to the County of Essex with respect to the collection of waste and the delivery of such waste.
In order for this by-law from the County to be initiated, four of the seven local municipalities would need to support the change, comprising at least 50 per cent of the electors in the County pass resolutions in support of the change.
The report presented to council saw that there would be new weekly organic collection, including food scrapes, with bi-weekly garbage collection, bi-weekly leaf and yard waste collection from April to November, and monthly white goods collection.
The Town of Essex currently already offers organic waste collection, which is collected with their yard waste.
Mayor Sherry Bondy says she's not happy with the percentage of support needed to support the change.
"50 per cent of the electors, I also think that there's a whole design flaw with it. 50 per cent of the electors is just not enough. It really should be 65 or 70 [per cent], it means that really like 10 more electors in all of Essex County can make a difference, and I think that that's something that is not very democratic."
Councillor Jason Matyi says it's a slippery slope.
"There's a lot of unknowns in this that I don't feel comfortable supporting without knowing. I don't know if I can protect my real residents, I don't know how much extra they're going to be paying or not paying. When we started this, we were supposed to be looking at the savings to the economy and scale like that, and I still haven't seen a concrete number."
Councillor Joe Garon says he's not sure if switching would actually save residents money.
"I guess where I'm with it is the level of service, I've talked to several people and they've expressed that they do like our service that we're giving them right now for the garbage pick-up. And the only way I see them even saving some money is by affecting that level of service and doing every other week, or whatever, we could do that ourselves."
Now that council has opposed the initiative, garbage collection throughout the Town will remain as is.
So far, the Town of Tecumseh and the Municipality of Leamington approved the by-law change for their respective town's, with the Town of Essex now opposed.
The remaining municipalities will be presented with the report within the upcoming weeks.
Approval is being sought now, so that in the case of approval and uploading, a tender can be issued in late fall of 2023, to allow any potential suppliers to order the necessary equipment to be prepared for a 2025 contract start.