As I may have mentioned, we are having some trouble with trash collection up here in Point Roberts. The guy with the contract has announced he is throwing it in as of June 30. He will, apparently, continue to run the transfer station where we can bring our trash and recycling, I guess, but maybe not our recycling. Not clear to me.
Fortunately, the County Council has stepped forward into the breach—or into the trash--so to speak. Those of us on the Point Interface email list received the following email on June 1 from the person who is alleged to represent Point Roberts on the Council. Well, maybe not ‘represent’ us, but at least have some kind of knowledgeable relationship to us, and she has indeed been up here several times in recent years. Here is the entire text of that message:
Regarding what you may have heard or read, Whatcom County is responsible for your receiving responsible garbage service. If a certified garbage collector at any time interrupts or discontinues responsible, contracted garbage service, Whatcom County, working with the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission will ensure your service will continue.
Please forward this information to anyone you think may be interested.
I will forward any related information I receive.
Barbara Brenner, Whatcom County Council Member
Ms. Brenner apparently has failed to receive any related information insofar as two weeks have passed without any further messages. I’m happy to know that the County has this responsibility, but I’m not sure what it means from the County’s perspective. The County itself, of course, has no garbage trucks, so the County itself isn’t going to be providing anything, including ‘responsible garbage service.’ It’s only responsible for finding somebody else to do that. That might take awhile; that might take forever. After all, the County wasn’t making much headway in the matter of the current ‘contracted garbage service’ (that is, the curbside recyling) that was discontinued some time ago. So I’m dubious about the likelihood of their proceeding to remedy the new situation with any particular speed.
I wonder if it ever occurs to elected politicians to communicate truthfully, honestly, straight talk and all that with the public? Maybe Ms. Brenner could have sent us something like this:
Yikes! We just heard that the guy with the certificate to collect garbage is pulling out at the end of the month and we don’t have any clear plans at the moment about what to do next. We’re hoping to have a meeting soon to see whether some other company would be interested in taking the task on. But for the moment, we are pretty clueless. We’ve been fiddling around with this problem for a couple of years, but, strangely, it never occurred to us that we might come to this unhappy situation because, of course, we are pretty short-term thinkers here what with elections coming up so often and you people up there being so low on our list of priorities. Sorry! Probably won’t do better next time, but I did want you to know that we are thinking about you and your problems.
I’d have been pretty pleased with that, even if I still had to haul my own trash.
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2 comments:
I find it interesting and (at the same time) confusing that you question the county's commitment to our current trash situation, including Barbara Brenner's email, who by the way does represent Point Roberts on Whatcom County Council, yet you don't question *why* the hauler himself is throwing in the towel.
You say "I wonder if it ever occurs to elected politicians to communicate truthfully, honestly, straight talk and all that with the public?" yet the same could be asked of you.
To get a better understanding of the whole trash situation, all you needed to do was to talk to me (one of the three Complainants against PRR with the WUTC) and I would have been happy to communicate truthfully, honestly and given you the straight talk but I was never asked.
It is a lot safer to sit on the sidelines and criticize the players then to take the ball and get into the game.
Renee
Hi, Renee -
As the husband of one of the complainants, I thought Judy's post was excellent. Throughout this process, the county has been better at making promises than taking responsibility. I suspect that some of these promises prompted the hauler to believe they would support him and might have caused him to go farther down this road than he intended. But in the end, the county ended up supporting no one, left it to you guys to do what they should have done, turned what should have been a simple administrative action into a community crisis, caused a lot of unnecessary animosity between friends and neighbors, and generally ran the truck into a ditch, so to speak. I think that Judy's post rightly calls out the county, and one commissioner in particular whose involvement has been consistently counterproductive.
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