Guest Opinion: Time to Get the County Out of Garbage Business

By Allen Rosenberg

The Exchange provides a terrific service on Orcas, as does Take it or Leave it on Lopez. So do the Thrift Store and Consignment Treasures on San Juan, and other re-use and recycle operations on multiple islands.

Only the first two are on County property, and only Take it or Leave it is managed by County.

Solid waste services are critical to our community, but that doesn’t mean they need to be provided by County, nor that they should be funded by a tax (or “user fee”). Grocery stores, gasoline stations, electrical service, propane delivery, telephone service, etc. are all critical to our community, but they’re not provided by County and they’re not (directly anyway) subsidized by tax revenue.

It’s true that the Exchange and Take it or Leave It business models benefit from traffic at the solid waste stations where they’re located. They’d probably be worse off if there were a major shift to curbside service and reduced or eliminated self haul. There’s been an implication that’s going to happen if Proposition Two fails, but it’s not necessarily true, despite what Council and other proponents may say.

If County gets out of the business and rescinds flow control, it’s very likely that robust self haul service will be available. There is no good reason to believe that curbside will increase more under Plan B than Plan A. In fact Plan A includes a gate fee, to raise revenue and to “encourage trip consolidation” which would probably leave self haul more expensive for most customers than using curbside collection, encouraging more customers to sign up for it. (See the table in Council Resolution 43-2011.)

Right, more curbside is probably bad for the Exchange and Take it or Leave it. It could be argued that they’d be better off if everybody self hauled, but that’s an unlikely outcome. And anyway, reuse and recycle activities which aren’t co-located with the dumps do very well now.

Leasing part of County SW sites to a private operator to provide drop off service doesn’t require leasing the whole site, nor imply that operator would control access to the Exchange or Take it or Leave it. Drop off service only requires a parking area for two or three packer trucks and some two yard dumpsters and, possibly, “roll off” boxes for other recycling or construction debris. There is no reason it couldn’t co-exist with current re-use operations.

The choice in this election is about how we responsibly deal with the solid waste we generate and how we pay for it (and who pays how much). Getting people to consume less, or waste less, or throw away less is beyond its scope (and a lot of that is effectively beyond local control anyway). Plan A does nothing more for reduce/reuse/recycle than Plan B–arguably less. It’s more money, unfairly collected, for the wrong system, badly designed, managed, and governed.