Wisconsin lawmaker would be smart to approve Assembly Bill 798, which would raise the state's garbage disposal fee to $10 a ton from $3 and earmark the proceeds for local government recycling programs.

This newspaper is no fan of fee increases by AB798 is an exception. That's because:

- A $10-per-ton fee would be a more realistic reflection of the long-term cost of a landfill operation.
- The Higher fee would mean an estimated $57 million or so in additional revenue for the state recycling fund, reducing or eliminating the need for property owners to pay into the fund.
- Raising the solid waste disposal fee would bring it into line with the amount that neighboring states charge, making it less likely that the neighbors would wave bye-bye to their garbage as trucks haul it to Wisconsin for cheap, liability-free disposal.

The amount of trash entering the state from Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota grew by 46 percent from 2003 to 2004, to almost 2.2 million tons. Illinois was the biggest contributor with 1.4 million tons, most of it dumped in a landfill in Kenosha.

"Wisconsin's lower than average tipping fee effectively allows neighboring states to 'offload' the liability of landfilling and the responsibility for waste reduction - in many cases transporting their dirtiest waste into the state," said a report of the Website of the Wisconsin John Muir Chapter of the Sierra Club at http://wisconsin.sierraclub.org/tracker/AB798.html.

"Encouraging other states to annual dump millions of tons of garbage in Wisconsin is bad policy," said Rep. Spencer Black, D-Madison, when be announced last fall that he would introduce AB798. "This bill will help both our environment and our property taxpayers."

Opponents of the bill argue that increasing the fee would have a negative impact on business. But it's a pretty sure bet that most people in Wisconsin favor a fee increase that reduces the property-tax requirement for recycling and encourages the neighbors to keep their garbage at home.