Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Woods Cross City Council looking to raise fees again.
The Woods Cross City Council is currently considering requiring residents to pay for a recycling container. This is a bad idea. My parents are on a fixed income. They currently only have one garbage can which costs them about $10 a month. What the City Council is proposing is a more than 30% increase for the neediest residents of Woods Cross. Do you want to have a City Council that is willing to increase garbage fees by 30%? I don't.
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4 comments:
I know it has been a while since you wrote this, but we just had a city council meeting in Bountiful about a proposed curbside recycling program. The Woods Cross City Councilwoman who is proposing your program addressed what WX was doing. She noted that the price of their recycling can would be low because they would contract with the same Waste Management company to do the work. Even then she noted how extremely low their rates are in comparison with the rest of the county and the Wasatch front. It is true that adding a $3.35 charge to provide recycling on top of $10 for one garbage can is a 30% increase. However, this is an example of how to lie with statistics, which does not make good public policy. It is also an example of a lack of foresight when it comes to waste management policy on the local level. I hope Bountiful will follow WX's lead.
I don't have a problem with curb-side recycling. My problem is with forcing everyone to do it, even those who don't want it or can't afford it. If you are forcing someone to do it and they can't (or don't want to) afford it, you are raising their fees by 30%.
To say it any other way is to try and spin recycling as a great thing that everyone should WANT to do. Guess what? Not everybody wants to recycle, why should they be forced to pay for it?
I think the city residents benefit by citywide participation rather than subscription only for a couple reasons. First of all, there will probably be high enough demand to make it more economic to implement it citywide than to manage a complex subscription system. I could be wrong, and would welcome some study on that point.
Secondly, I would think that the city would pay less in dumping fees with more residents recycling. Furthermore, everyone does pay when garbage is involved, because garbage just doesn't go away. The fact that we routinely externalize the costs of our society's waste does not mean that we will not have to pay for it in a way other than city fees. Your parents may not pay for it in their lifetimes, and you may not, but when we run out of landfill space in 20-30 years, me and your children will pay. Recycling enormously reduces these external costs.
"Recycling enormously reduces these external costs."
I don't buy that. Give me some hard numbers and then tell me how they compare to $3.35 per house, per month for "20 - 30 years". Assuming 2000 homes in Woods Cross (very low number). This would be over 1.6 million dollars in 20 years and that's not counting interest.
Our country doesn't FORCE everyone to use mass transit, just because some people believe that our climate is getting warmer.
Global warming is a whole other argument that I don't wish to get into.
My point is forcing people to do something that they can't afford or maybe just don't want to do because of a problem that may or may not exist is not the American way. Have we forgotten the reason for the Boston Tea Party so quickly?
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