Ready for a Happy New Year, I picked up the new issue of the All Point Bulletin to enjoy its annual recap of ‘the year that was.’ This is a nice tradition of small town newspapers in lots of places: the first issue of the year goes back and gathers up the last year’s important events, reminding readers of what they just went through. Since it is all in the past, there are no sudden shocks. There are good things and bad things to be reminded of, but it’s all familiar. There is a lot to be said for familiarity, just as there is a lot to be said for kindness and civility.
To my surprise, the front page of the Bulletin included, in addition to the year’s month by month reminiscences, a new item. Oh, shoot, no fun here. In the ongoing saga of recycling that we are engaged by and in, here in Point Roberts, a new shot has been fired across the bow. Ouch!
It is reported that a trio of locals has filed a complaint with the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission demanding that the Commission (1) pull the permit of the current P.R. refuse and recycling company, (2) that it forbid the County from permitting any varying accommodation for recycling in Point Roberts, and (3) that a lot of penalties be assessed. It’s a document prepared by a lawyer, so it has a lot of that legalistic language that kind of sounds like the heart of the issue is that people are feeding babies poison candy. Not the fault of the complainants, of course; just the nature of the law and its mode of communicating. Nevertheless, reading the complaint makes it sound like it’s a pretty alarming issue. It’s full of accusations like abuse of the public trust, and lack of duty to the community and disingenuous and untrustworthy behavior and systematic manipulation of facts and law, not to mention threats and fear-mongering.
Pretty amazing: all that right here in little downtown Point Roberts.
It’s not clear to me why this issue has become so heated, but I would guess that the underlying fear is revealed in the final sentences of the complaint:
This matter . . . leaves the Point Roberts community facing a slippery slope toward the potential degradation or elimination of other essential services the community deserve. We should be able to enjoy the same level of service as other citizens of Whatcom County, be equally able to fulfill our duties toward environmental protection and effective waste management, and not be discriminated against because of our location.
We are about to watch the dominoes fall, I guess. Today it’s curbside recycling, tomorrow it’s water and power. Next year, they'll be taking my street away. Somehow, I just don’t feel that worried. ‘Terrible things could happen,’ isn’t really a very persuasive or reasoned claim in the absence of any evidence of likelihood of ‘terrible things happening.’
We need to be treated just like everybody else in Whatcom County, on the other hand, is a claim about equity. But it’s not a very strong one. I lived through years of children telling me that everybody had to get exactly the same thing or ‘it’s not fair.’ Any parent knows the ‘it’s not fair’ claim is usually bogus. In most circumstances, we are better off figuring out exactly what works best in specific contexts, not forcing everyone into the same Procrustean allotment. I would strongly argue that, in most civic service provision, the weirdness of Point Roberts’ location means that solutions that work easily in the rest of the state might not work here and something individualized needs to be worked out. Additionally, its important to remember that differences matter and that difference is not the same as discrimination. In fact, Point Roberts just received a lot of public funding for 150 acres of public preservation at Lily Point. Is government ‘discriminating’ against every other 5 square miles of Washington state if it doesn’t provide them with an equal park?
I may be prejudiced in this matter because up in Roberts Creek, we used to have curbside recycling, just as we used to have it here in Point Roberts, but it didn’t work from an economic perspective (just as it probably won’t work here), so now it’s self-haul and for the past 10 years, that’s worked fine. But, of course, they're Canadians.
If you want to read the complaint, you can find it here.
Then you need to find the complaint document (the third item on the list), which is Docket #082129 ‘complaint.doc ID: 346AOE’ You just click on it and it will come up as a Word document.
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8 comments:
Hi, Judy -
I agree that not all solutions work equally well everywhere. However, the concern here is that the local garbage company was actually making money (not much, but it was positive) with curbside pickup, and is now losing money with free drop-off. Unfortunately, the owner has been trying to get rid of the responsibility to provide any recycling service at all for years, and the complainants believe, legitimately in my view, that the current drop-off service is economically less tenable than the curbside pickup and is therefore an interim step toward eliminating the recycling service completely. This would put us all in the position of having to pay for another container of trash that could have been recycled, since we can't legally bring recycling across the border into Canada (no household trash can be brought over....). If you look at the financial statements of the company, I think you'd be surprised at what's been going on there. I used to like the owner of the company very much and was proud of the way the local "transfer station" was run, but no longer.
Let me add some perspective to my last comment. For those of you who don't live in Point Roberts, how many of you would make the town dump a tour stop when you show people from out of town what a cool place you live in? I did. For one thing, it had "Fridgehenge", a collection of old refrigerators arranged in a circle approximating the configuration of Stonehenge. The owner had a decidedly artistic bent, salvaging scraps that people had thrown out, turning them into art pieces, and arraying them around the property. The property was clean, well maintained, and even attractive, as it served as both a dump and art gallery. The owner also seemed very environmentally conscious and well informed about waste management issues and practices. For obvious reasons, he garnered a lot of well-deserved support in the community, a savings account of goodwill that he's currently drawing from and that has not yet run out.
However, he has apparently been against the concept of recycling for many years, having stated in the past that it was more efficient to simply throw recyclables away rather than actually, you know, recycle them. In fact, when he was still providing curbside pickup, he or his workers would often throw separated recyclables in with the trash instead of picking them up as recyclables.
Since then, he appears to have restructured the finances of the company to create an artificial crisis that justifies the suspension of curbside recycling pickup. Fridgehenge is gone, most of art pieces have disappeared, and the dump is a much more conventional place than it used to be - dirty, disorganized, not as well maintained. Where curbside recycling used to produce revenues, the free drop-off service he provides now is a cost item, since he has to pay to get rid of it. Suspending the curbside pickup service simply makes no sense, unless the long term objective is to eliminate recycling altogether; I can only conclude that that's his ultimate goal, and it's a service that I consider essential, both environmentally and morally.
The crux of your argument is that curbside recycling here does not work from an economic perspective. On what information are you basing this conclusion? The hauler grossed $20,000 a year on curbside recycling. Now that income stream is gone due to free self haul. How long do you think it will be before he requests a rate increase to cover that loss?
The hauler’s own financial records show that he’s personally making a tidy sum. Driver wages and benefits for 2007 were $161,472. There are two drivers: the owner and one employee. On top of that, there is a separate entry of $78,489 for officer/director salary and wages. The owner is the only officer/director listed. Not bad for part-time work.
As the person with the legal education (though not a lawyer) in the axis of evil of complainants, I urge everyone to be fully informed and take the time to read the exhibits that go along with the complaint. That way people can see the facts: nothing was made up and nothing was exaggerated. We used the hauler’s own words and letters where he threatened the county and used fear to garner support among customers. I would be happy to sit down with anyone and have him or her argue against our position after reading the entire complaint.
Although you don’t feel worried about losing services here on the Point, I certainly do. Maybe that is one of the major differences between those of us who live here full time and those who do not.
By the way, the three of us (one high school grad living full time on the Point for 19 years and one college grad living full time on the Point for 33 years) worked on this equally but most of the “legalistic language” you quote was suggested by the non-lawyers.
The importance of being informed can never be underestimated, and an emotional response to a factual situation like this unnecessarily divisive.
Shannon
Correction: He made $20,000 NET, not gross, from curbside recycling fees.
Shannon
why do i think that curbside recycling doesn't work as an economic perspective? well, currently it doesn't look to be working anywhere. See NYT:
"The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices." New York Times, 12/07/08 and if i knew how to embed a link i would do so. article is titled: 'back at junk value, recyclables are piling up.' recyclables are now ending up in landfills routinely, according to the article.
...yes, but when curbside recycling was suspended, recyclers were very profitable because of the high demand for commodities at the time. The hauler on PR was the only one in the state who was not selling his recycling into a high-demand market. The rising and now falling demand for recycled materials is unrelated to the local hauler's claim that the service is unprofitable, as demonstrated by his own financial statements.
$21,904 in revenue came solely from the service fees charged to customers for curbside recycling, not from the sale of recycling commodities as your response implies. In the past three years, he paid between $1,993 and $3,528 to get rid of his recycling, leaving the rest as pure profit. The bottoming out of the commodity markets has nothing to do with curbside recycling being economically feasible in this case because he has never relied on commodity revenue. I wrote a more detailed explanation of this in a letter to the editor in the Nov. 2008 All Point Bulletin.
Shannon
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