At Any Price?

Mr. Gellatly's Freedom 2000 trash pick up is moving forward.  Yesterday, we received this message:

Requests for curbside garbage collection services and curbside recycling collection services can be made by contacting:

CaNDO Recycling and Refuse at 360-945-CNDO (2636)

Please leave a message with your name and return phone number and we will contact you and set up regularly scheduled or on call service.

A start date has not yet been firmly established, but will be announced soon. Preliminary startup plans are moving faster than expected.

We've been without trash pickup for about 7 months now, so maybe everyone is desperate, but I would think that some information might be offered about the price of the service?  

Trash: The (Momentary) Finale

Today, the WUTC down in Olympia posted its decision on the  trash and recycling applications for Point Roberts.  The Commission appears to be composed of three Commissioners, two of whom supported Mr. Gellatly's application, and one of whom supported neither application.  That means that Gellatly has the contract, but the decision comes with qualification.  And that is that Freedom 2000 must have the system up and running in 45 days.

The general view of the decision, which can be seen here and runs to 53 pages, is that this is a mess and that Wilkowski's operation has been in 'flagrant' violation of a number of laws governing this work, and that Gellatly has been somewhat slack himself in regards to state laws about trucking/registrations.  However, it appeared to them that Gellatly has shown a willingness to become a law abider, whereas Wilkowski had, if anything, shown a deeper propensity  for the other direction.  The most flagrant of the Wilkowski violations appear to be his willingness to provide on-call services after he gave up his G certificate.  Such actions represented knowing and intentional disregard of the laws under which he was permitted to operate in the Washington State trash collection world, although the actions might have been of considerable benefit to some Point Roberts' residents.

I would guess that that particular offense wouldn't have weighed too heavily with many of Pt. Roberts' residents, but the WUTC must of necessity look at things in a different light, be attentive to the letter of the law.

There are three paragraphs in the main opinion that I found particularly interesting.  Paragraphs 69 and 70 both address the County's role in this general fiasco; paragraph 71 speaks to the considerable animosity that has been generated in Point Roberts itself, anger sufficient to split the social fabric.  The WUTC commissioners think that Mr. Gellatly's first job will be to heal those wounds.  Lucky Mr. Gellatly!  I will be looking forward to his State of Point Roberts Trash speech soon.

In the dissenting opinion, the third commissioner doubts any of this is going to work because of the County's failure in the first place to address Pt. Roberts' uniqueness, or its failure to get some other already-established trash collection business to take on the problem of being us. Actually, Mr. Wilkowski pretty much supported this position himself in testimony before the Commission where he apparently argued that the WUTC should approve neither his application nor Gellatly's, which action would force the County to do something.  This position was countered in the majority opinion on the grounds that the WUTC can't make the County do anything, although they acknowledged that it was doubtful that anybody could create an economically viable business plan for Pt. Roberts trash collection under the current circumstances. 

And so we go on.  Check back in about 45 days.

Well, What Do We Think?

This is about trash collection, and is a brief update.  The WUTC asked that all the exhibits and information and witness lists with respect to the two applicants for the Point Roberts trash collection problem be turned over by January 15.  Included in that information are summaries of public comments with respect to both applicants.

With respect to Point Refuse and Recycling (Wilkowski), there were 55 comments in total, with 37 supporting this company, 16 opposing it, and 2 uncertain.  With respect to Freedom 2000 (Gellatly), there were 18 comments in total, with 9 supporting the company, 2 opposing it, and 7 undecided.

It's not clear to me how they came by these counts since any given letter did not necessarily address simply  one company or the other.  Many of the letters from the public mentioned/discussed/analyzed both companies, so I don't know whether such a letter would be included in the Wilkowski totals or the Gellatly totals, or counted in both (e.g., if the writer specifically supported Wilkowski and opposed Gellatly, or vice versa).  There is no explanation within the memorandum as to how these counts were made.

As well, there is no entry on the website indicating when the WUTC expects to meet on this.

Howl!

UPDATED BELOW
Coyotes very active today up here in the center parts of Point Roberts.  I don’t hear them all that often, and usually it is in the summertime.  But today, there have been repeated periods of call and response.  Omens of some kind, doubtless, but we’ve lost the ability to know what they’re trying to tell us.

And reasonably warm today, too.  Maybe that’s what they’re howling about.  The bushes are showing alarming signs of swelling buds.  ‘Wait,’ I want to tell them, ‘You’ve got all of January still to get through.’  But maybe they, like the coyotes, know something we don’t.  We did see, coming through Vancouver a few days ago a row of four trees in bloom--pink flowers--in front of the condos down on English Bay, right near the entrance to the Burrard St. Bridge.  And there are daffodils showing their leaf tips over at the Community Center, here in Point Roberts.  Well, we’ll see.

Other things we are seeing about:

1. According to the business news, the FDIC (the part of the federal government that is in charge of bank closings, among other things) is said to be getting serious with Sterling Financial Corp., the parent company of Sterling Savings Bank.  Sterling is said to have less than two months to get a plan together to get its business, as it were, back on track.  So we’ll be hearing more about that as February comes to a close.  In the meantime, two or three more legal firms have announced that they’re trolling for participants in a class action suit against the company.  The FDIC has been on a vacation as far as closing banks is concerned, but they’ll be back in that business next week.  It is also reported that they’re hiring a lot of new, but temporary, workers to help them in that sad activity.

2. The WUTC held its public hearing on Pt. Roberts' trash issues on the 29th, although earlier in the day than originally scheduled.  I suppose it occurred to them that it wasn’t difficult enough for people from Point Roberts to get down to Olympia for this hearing to find out what they think, so they re-scheduled it to 9:300 a.m.  A veritable red-eye trip.

In any case, they had the hearing, and attendance appeared minimal, at least as far as the ‘Sign-In Sheet’ revealed.  At the end of whatever happened, the Commission requested the staff to get some information for them (not a moment too soon, I’d say) as to Whatcom County’s actual trash/recycling plan, the Commission’s staff’s analysis of that plan, the State of Washington’s views on the status of Freedom 2000, and the (I assume) federal Dept. of Transportation’s view on the status of Freedom 2000 with respect to licensure  (12/31, 'notice of bench requests' at the link).

And within less than 48 hours, the state responded ('response' 12/31, at the link; now there’s a bureaucracy that’s performing at top speed; kudos to them) by announcing that they had dissolved the company (i.e., Freedom 2000) on December 1, 2009, because of the company’s failure to complete various paperwork required of such companies in order to be recognized by the state.  That would be 28 days BEFORE the public hearing on whether Freedom 2000, the company, should be awarded the opportunity to collect our trash and recycling. 

A friend asks, ‘So, where does that leave us now?’  Good question.  Freedom 2000 is no longer a company, apparently, and Points Recycling and Refuse, the Wilkowsky contestant, is offering to do less than the County says is to be done.  I would think that figuring this out would take, oh, maybe another 30 days?  Stay in touch.  Or maybe just howl.

Update:  On January 4, Freedom 2000 filed reinstatement papers, including fees, etc.  So, presumably it's back in business.  Link here.

Quagmire

 The very word is so nostalgic, so late-60’s, so Vietnam War-ish.  But nowadays, quagmire means so much more:  Afghanistan, health care reform, trash collection.  Yes, I’m afraid it’s once more time to get a trash collection update.   It’s been maybe six months now since those of us in Point Roberts lost all curbside trash collection, in addition to curbside recycling pick-up.  Each month, it seems as if the WUTC has yet another problem to contend with in respect to getting this knotty problem solved.  Mostly, WUTC thinks that it needs another thirty days to do whatever needs to be done.

And what needs to be done?  At the moment, we seem to have applications from two candidates: Freedom 2000, the Dave Gellatly/Ron Caulder outfit; and Point Recyling and Refuse, the Arthur Wilkowski outfit which, up until six months-ish ago actually had a certificate to provide those services and was in fact providing at least the trash collection part.  In fact, Wilkowski recently offered up several ways in which he might provide some services, but WUTC turned him down on the ‘temporary’ plan, and now we seem to be fixed on the full plan, which is not exactly as full as he used to provide.  And that is perhaps because the business model for the ‘full’ plan—curbside pickup of trash and recycling--is no better now than it was when he cut the curbside recycling because the business model had too few customers to make it a viable model.  You still with me?

The WUTC may now be as confused as many of us are.  I say this because their current plan (since Dec. 4) is to wait about 25 days and then have a public hearing on the issue.  The official reason for this is that, because the Commission has decided to combine its consideration of these two applicants—even though they are not applying to provide exactly the same service--it would be ‘appropriate to hold a public hearing. . . to provide an opportunity for members of the public to comment orally on the record concerning the pending applications.’  It’s particularly worth noting, I think, that on a matter that is of great concern to and (far too) lively comment among the residents of Point Roberts and of interest to virtually no one else in the State of Washington, the WUTC has decided to hold the hearing in Olympia, Washington, maybe 150 miles away from us.  To their credit, they scheduled it for 1:30 in the afternoon.  On the other side of the balance sheet, there’s not only the location but also the date: December 29.  So, if you aren’t too busy with post-Christmas shopping, or sunk in the post-Christmas blues, and have cleared out the Christmas guests, or returned from your Christmas travel, well...here’s an event that might attract your interest, fill up your otherwise blank calendar in that strange week between holidays, assuming the weather isn’t so unseemly as to make driving dicey.

If you don’t care that much or aren’t able to make the trip, however, WUTC will accept your written views up until January 4.  After that, I guess, they’ll be taking about 30 days either to make a decision, or to figure out how to get some information that they don’t already have.

The residents and sometime-users of trash and recycling collection have been busy making their views known to WUTC over the past months, of course.  The WUTC puts all comments on line, so you can check out your neighbors’ views here.  This is a list of all the documents they’ve received, and if, say, you want to see what Knick or Gordon thinks, click on the date of the document (the far left column).  Then you usually have to choose to see the document in either a ‘pdf’ or a ‘word’ format.  It’s not the friendliest website I’ve ever seen, but if you keep at it for awhile, you’ll probably get the knack.  If you lose the site, it might help to know that the docket # is 091687.

The complainant ladies trio are represented among these commenters, although if you read the APB you probably already know what they think.  Reading Mr. Wilkowski’s response to their comments may be of interest, though.  I, at least, had not seen his response to their views anywhere, and it is certainly the case that there are two sides (at least) to this dispute.   His response is here. 

About thirty people have taken the time to communicate their views and, having read them all, I can tell you it’s a mixed bag.  Some support Freedom 2000, some support Point Recycling, some support them both but just want a solution, some primarily support mandatory participation in a trash collection system in order to make sure that it’s economically viable.  I found it problematic to offer my views to WUTC insofar as I have no special or specific information (as opposed to rumors) that the WUTC lacks about either applicant or about the nature of trash and recycling collection.  On the other hand, perhaps they need to know where Point Roberts is located.  I do know that.

The Elegiac Season

A month ago, the leaves were just turning yellow—a little late in the season—but now they have made up for lost time by departing quickly and completely, leaving us barren and gray and wet and cold and in November in the Pacific Northwest.  Thinking about times past, wondering why we have to say goodbye so soon.  We sit in the house and look out the window and listen to Casals playing the Bach Suites for Cello, which is music that accommodates but doesn’t drag you down into the melancholy face of fall.  It has other faces, as well, all that scarlet and orange and yellow riotous color, but it doesn’t have them right this minute.

I’ve been trying to become the kind of person who has a lot of horizontal surfaces that are not filled up with stuff.  That is what gray fall does to me.  I’ve spent the day cleaning out file cabinets (all those IRS returns and supporting papers from 1997, for example), desk drawers, just ordinary drawers, trying to clear out enough inside space so that all the objects cluttering the horizontal surfaces will have someplace to go.  I’m not there yet; there’s not even one entirely empty horizontal space in our main room.  But I can hope.

And also I can go to the transfer station to deliver 140 pounds of recyclables of various kinds, much of it the aforementioned paper.  Incidentally, it would be good if we could find something just a little lighter than paper which, when gathered into the thousands of sheets really does get heavy.  I suppose that’s what the computer is supposed to do for us, but we are mostly so afraid of the computer losing its mind with all our paper in it that we keep duplicate information on actual paper.  We’re a wary bunch.

The dump was also gray and wet, but well populated with people bringing in washing machines and multiple garbage cans and countless dark green plastic bags filled with paper and plastic/glass bottles and aluminum cans, all of it with a faint odor of decay.  You come in and they weigh you and you go out and they weigh you again, and then you pay for the difference.  (Maybe restaurants could work that way, too, but payment would be reversed, of course, for increased weight, not for decreased as it is at the dump.)  It’s not the worst system in the world (which leaves considerable room for improvement, of course).  But it does remind me of the fact that I didn’t used to have much experience of the dump because the operators used to pick it up at our houses, and now we take it to, metaphorically, to theirs.

There is still no resolution in sight for this problem.  The company that applied for a new permit has not been selected; the company that used to have the permit has now applied for a new permit.  According to the WUTC internet site, the next meeting on all this is December 10.  And then it will be Christmas, of course, and the New Year, and nothing is going to happen then.  And then it will be 2010.  Maybe in the new year, we can bring ourselves to call off all the disputations and disagreements, can do what a friend referred to as ‘an Emily Litella.'  In the grand old days of Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner regularly inhabited a character named Emily Litella who would complain bitterly about some topic (I particularly remember her rant on ‘Soviet jewelry’) only to have, eventually, someone point out that she had got the whole thing wrong as a result of a simple error.  “Soviet Jewry,” they would say.  And Emily would get a momentarily stunned look and then say, ‘Oh. . . Never mind.’ 

It’s going to take something like that to get progress on the trash front, I’m afraid.  But Gilda Radner died a long time ago, alas, and it's possible we no longer know how to say, 'Never mind.'

Pt. Roberts Leads the Country

Perhaps we’ve become a kind bellwether town.  Today I read that, in Philadelphia, they are having the kind of trouble that is leading them to the this action:

“* Households will receive robo-calls this week, notifying them of the switch to twice-a-month trash collection.”

Of course, they’re not really going far enough in Philadelphia on the trash scene, given our experience.  On the other hand, they’re planning to close all the libraries, which makes our 3-day/week look like we're just not making enough effort in closing down civic life.

Our trash collection problems, of course, remain unresolved.  Freedom 2000 (name not yet updated to 2008) is the local company that has applied to become the new trash collector, but the county appears to be somewhat reluctant to approve its application. [Correction: as noted in the comments, it is not the County but the WUTC--Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission--that is required to sign off and make a recommendation on the application.]  This might be because the county [correction, again: WUTC] has previously had some problems with the company's owners over licensure and dumping practices, according to the newspaper in its August issue, which is not currently on line so I cannot offer a link.  Or it might be because the company's plan is problematic with respect to profitability given the small customer base and the newsness of the company to the business, according to the September newspaper.  (It should be noted that the previous trash collector reported exactly that problem but the County [again, WUTC] was somewhat less than sympathetic to him from all accounts.)  Or it might be that the County [again, WUTC] is hoping someone else will object to Freedom 2000, making it possible for the County [again, WUTC] to keep its hands clean. (Newspaper headline: "Little Opposition to Trash Hauler Seen") All I know is what I read, of course, but between the lines of the trash stories in the last two months' All Point Bulletin, it certainly looks like those are some of the lines of thinking at the County [again, WUTC] level.  

Maybe Philadelphia would like to offer some advice?

Your County Government At Work

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.

Keeping One's Eye on Whatever

I’ve never been very good at watching sports like football where the ball is small and is moved around quickly and where everybody pretends to be holding/hiding it. I’m always surprised to find that the ball is in some other part of the field than where I had thought it was. But, I have always thought that in real life my ball spotting skills are somewhat better. Apparently not so much.

This past week, while I was fretting about the potential demise of Sterling Bank, what was actually demising was the Point Roberts trash collection business. A letter went out to all the residents a day or so ago announcing that, as of June 30, the owner was turning in his curbside trash collecting certificate (this certificate permits him to have a monopoly practice) and would henceforth settle in to tending the transfer station to which we are free to cart our trash and recyclables, although not, presumably, for free.

Well, this has been a long time coming and it’s not that I didn’t think this conclusion was a possibility, but rather that I thought it wouldn’t happen quite this soon. According to the owner, he is calling it quits because it is not feasible to keep trying to conduct the business and also to engage in the drawn out regulatory and legal issues that have arisen between him, the county, the state commission, and some residents. According to the June issue of the All Point Bulletin, a County Judge has ordered him to provide extensive information about the business (including maintenance records for his trucks), and the WUTC said it was conducting a financial audit. (This newspaper account was written before the decision to throw in the towel.)

Well, we are all engrossed in considerations of the appropriate role of empathy these days because of Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, and a charge of excessive demands from bureaucracies is likely to elicit such empathy. Who knows, however, where truth, justice, or high moral tone lies in all this. Certainly I don’t. It’s very difficult to know anything about such issues without a willingness to look through and analyze carefully a lot of information, and information is not always readily available, even in these days of the google and all it offers. But even if it were available, it might be that there are very different views about what are the important issues, what outcomes are being sought, and what is the point of the dispute. What we do know, however, is that after months and months of discussion and charges and countercharges, of litigation and mediation, of hearings proposed and conducted, is that we no longer have either garbage pickup service or recyclable pickup service.

My sense of this is that we are worse off than we were, but also that we are back where we were ten years ago, so no worse off than we used to be. Maybe we can just conclude that ‘No Harm, No Foul’ is the applicable judgment. And, with Obama, we can be ‘Looking Forward, Not Backwards.’ If only I was sure where the ball actually is. Or was. Or even will be.