Focus

City council seemed to lose focus when discussing the proposed waste recycling plant two weeks ago. One cannot blame Mayor Fedeli for focusing on the dollar-a-bag for garbage since he rightfully took a lot of flak the last time he raised this unsavoury topic. Chair of Works, Mason has to take some of the heat for even bringing a report to council with the dollar-a-bag financing scheme that became the focus of the discussion. But staff, who has floated this trial bag-balloon numerous times in the past, had to know better.

The report, which highlighted the need for better recycling facilities to meet the present and future obligations for reducing landfill waste and more recycling of resources, got all out of focus when staff proposed to finance the plan with a user-pay scheme based on the number of bags of garbage placed at curb side. I started to focus on the cost of an additional bureaucrat needed to run the buck-a-bag scheme, but soon caught myself and got back on track.

Just as the scheme to finance the Rail Lands debt with a buck-a-bag was ill-advised, so is the recycling scheme. The Rail Lands issue may have had political implications of laying blame on past councils, but the issue is really that we have to pay for our sins as well as our pleasures and it should simply come out of the general levy.

User-pay plans ought to only be for specific use functions – not a general service like garbage collection. If we want, or even need, a new recycling plant, put it in the budget and pay for it out of taxes. Don’t lose focus on the objective by divisive payment schemes. In fact, Councillor Mason ought to have been appealing to staff not to waste his time rather than trying to get a feel from council about the project. How many times is Engineering going try selling this scheme? Every time there is a new council?

I’ll bet a loonie to a Horton’s maple donut that the Dalton Gang wishes it had never mentioned a user-pay OHIP fee to fund health care. (Paul Martin wishes it too). Why didn’t they simply put the cost in their budget and pay for it out of any of the numerous taxes they collect? They already broke a promise about raising taxes so leave it at that – don’t give us a chance to focus on OHIP. Obviously, Dalton’s staff had lost focus. That reminds me of a former councillor whose penchant for mispronunciation said ‘focus’ as if the word had two u’s.

As councillor Maroosis commented, he remembers the trouble they had finding a dump site the last time and has no desire to go through that exercise again. If you think the Merrick landfill site is a long way out of town, consider where the next dump will be. The Adam’s Mine might look good in twenty years. This council should be searching for ways to extend the life of Merrick, and that ought to have been the main focus of the staff report.

We have to divert some of our refuse away from Merrick and what better way than to recycle it. There are a large number of North Bay citizens who do not recycle anything. Some do not on the basis that it costs the city money to recycle, others because they simply cannot be bothered. That staff report might have made more sense to council if it had detailed the cost of filling Merrick with glass, plastics, cans, leaves and grass cuttings. What affect does the cubic bulk of these items have on the lifespan of the dump? Could we move the closing date back to 25 instead of 20 years? The focus should have been on how much money that will save the city – because the next dump is going to cost more, much more.

A composting pad within easy driving distance for grass and greens refuse makes good sense. There might even be a few bucks to be made selling the compost, but let’s not focus on that. Can we get more money from the recyclable trash? Is there some entrepreneur out there who can manufacture goods from recycled plastic or metal in a plant here in the north? Council might even be able to sell part of Birch’s Road Swamp and Rocks acreage to them at a really good price to set up a facility.

In fact, maybe the whole recycling plant should be contracted out to someone who thinks they can eventually make a dollar on waste. Even more than we need a small ski hill and a big cruise boat, we need a place to recycle waste. Why not set up a contractor with a declining subsidy for a few years to run our waste recovery operation?

Lost in the focus on the dollar-a-bag was the report by retiring Director of Works Baker that a new Works location was needed. Why not, as councillor Koziol said, put the two projects together? There has to be some real economies of getting all Works staff together in one area, even if it is down in the Swamp and Rocks acreage. Council might even begin to see this as a need rather than a want and put it in the sacrosanct capital budget system.

In the meantime, we have to do some more education on the needs and benefits of recycling. Maybe it is time to go back to our students and let them loose on the populace with their ideas of how to better manage our waste. They are the ones who are going to inherit this city and they might just have more clout in getting their parents to recycle than we suspect. It might even be a timely Science project – “Focus on Garbage”.