Am I Too Late for the Garbage?

Today I was minding my own business when I noticed mail in the tray. It was from a the county, and it looked official. Usually mail that looks official is carefully crafted to look that way. You open it, and surprise! Someone wants to sell you insurance. I was curious who was pestering us this week so I opened it.

Surprise! Not insurance! If was a notification that this was our last chance to raise an objection to the new waste surcharge. But it had to be in writing, with our official residential customer number on it, and sent in to them in time for their meeting yesterday.

Well, too late for that. I read on to see what it was about. It seems we will have an extra yearly assessment tacked onto our garbage collection fee this year. The extra money is necessary so they can pay somebody to sift through everybody's garbage to see what people toss in the trash that could have been recycled.

They would publish the results in an annual report that we could all view online. Oboy! How useful! The report can tell us all that we could be recycling more instead of throwing stuff away. I could have told them that for free. This sounded like an idea somebody had in the 90s when people had more money and loftier ideals.

Thinking about it, that's $2 per year for every single household resident in the county, and far more for businesses and apartment complexes. That's a pretty hefty chunk of change. Somebody in the county is getting rich from this little political ploy. It passed unanimously. Remind me not to vote for any incumbants.

This is the same county that assessed us $15 per year extra for a tri-city hazmat station because there wasn't enough revenue to support it anymore. The money to support it used to come from the fees paid at landfills, but now that everybody is recycling...

This is also the same county that sends us snarky messages that we shouldn't recycle anything that food has had contact with, and to please rinse the scum and residue off the bottles and containers, thank-you-very-much.

The next item in the mail pile was a newsletter from the water company reminding us that we are in the midst of the most severe drought in local history, and to please, please, please not use water unless we absolutely have to.

I shredded everything and was careful to put it in the recycle bin, not the trash. Now that we have well-paid garbage police, I wouldn't want them knocking on our door. They might haul me off to recycle jail, and who would stop them? The real police? Unlikely. They don't have enough people on the force... no money.