Recycling Recycling

It seems the Athens-Hocking Solid Waste District is out of compliance with Ohio EPA. Still. And the district says they need more money in order to fix this. There's a shocker. But there's something smelly about this whole thing and it isn't the trash.

It all started over two decades ago with HB 592...

1988 - HB 592 was passed that created solid waste districts in the state because we weren't recycling enough and the landfills were filling up. The Ohio EPA gets to oversee the districts and tell them how to do things. Problem #1. Since it is a government entity, tax dollars pay for it. Problem #2.

In 2009, the Athens-Hocking Solid Waste District said they needed more money. To generate this money, they proposed a 'fee' of $3/ton of waste. A tax by any other name is still a tax. Call it a fee if it makes you feel better but it's still a tax. This tax would be levied on the trash haulers and will of course be passed on to their customers with rate increases.

But the tax must be approved by the county commissioners for each county, city council of the largest city in each county, and legislative authorities representing a combined population of at least 60 percent of the total population in each county. Athens loves paying taxes but the great people of Hocking County evidently do not. Logan City Council wouldn't pass it and neither would the county commissioners. It seems they had questions that were either not answered or were answered inadequately. Thank you to the elected officials in Hocking County for not playing the part of ostrich.

After a few months, the district recycled their plan to implement the $3 fee. Well, that is their business. Sort of. Hocking County again to the rescue. Questions gone unanswered concerning the finances of the district kept the Hocking County elected officials from approving the added tax.

Now Athens wants to take their ball and go home. The landfill used by the two counties is in Athens County. It's really close to the Athens/Hocking line though and wouldn't surprise me if some of it were located in Hocking County. Athens wants to break up with Hocking. The problem is that in order for a solid waste district to be a single county, that county must have a population of 100,000. Neither county meets that requirement and the Ohio EPA would have to approve the split. Hocking County would be left high and dry according to the threats made by the Athens County Commissioners. There's other stuff to it within the original bill that I am having a difficult time making heads or tails out of because it involves government speak and I'm not fluent in idiot.

The Ohio EPA says the Athens-Hocking District is not in compliance. I'm not sure exactly what that means but based on various newspaper articles dating back to February of 2010, we need to recycle more or maybe we need to generate more trash. I'm not sure. They want people to recycle but the county gets more money if we generate more trash. Since it's more money the county wants, do they want us to generate more trash? But the EPA says recycle.... makes my head spin....

The state says there is a partnership between public and private entities but at least a few of the private trash haulers don't exactly see it that way. They see it as the public side is pushing the private side out of business by causing the private haulers to raise rates. I can tell you that we pay almost twice as much out here in the county as what the people in the city pay using the county trash haulers. I'm pretty sure subsidies are involved. When the private trash haulers go to the landfill, they pay a fee to dump the trash. The county gets this fee. That's a subsidy, right?

But there's still the compliance problem. I'm not sure how the $3 tax will fix that unless it will be used to pay the EPA to look the other way. According to one of the private haulers, one way for the district to come into compliance is to add a handful of drop locations for recyclables in each county. Evidently there isn't enough participation and that's suppose to encourage it. In the same article from The Athens News:

He (the private hauler) said that officials often say that they are in the trash business because recycling doesn't pay for itself and they need the funds to pay for recycling.

Which is backed up on collegegreenmag.com:

“There’s not big money in recycling… so the government does it,” said Roger Bail, operations coordinator for the Athens-Hocking Waste District. “There’s money in trash.”

So they're trying to get more people to recycle more. We used to recycle stuff all the time. Pop and milk came in glass bottles. We took empty bottles to the store and got a deposit back. Now they come in throw away plastic. I like glass. And we drank water that came from the tap. You would fill a glass with water and wash the glass afterward to reuse it. Now we insist on carrying around plastic water bottles that end up in the landfill. But I'm sure the government had a hand in the glass bottles going away - probably some concern about hygiene. So the answer to that is now creating problems. Maybe if the government would stop trying to regulate everything, thus tying our hands, we wouldn't have either problem. We wouldn't be producing as much trash and would be recycling. Our trash haulers could make a living without raising rates to the point that many lower income families do not purchase the service to have their trash hauled away creating a bigger illegal dumping problem that the county also complains about.

Where and when will the madness stop?