Dear Editor,
I wish to strongly endorse the remarks of Coun. Carrie Fischer, reported in the last edition of the Western Wheel, on the subject of the new garbage bins that are being foisted on the citizens of Okotoks.
The decision of Council to go ahead with the administration’s proposals is wrong – wrong for the Town, wrong for the environment and especially wrong for those who are doing their best to reduce the production of waste. Not only that but I doubt if the new bins will do anything to reduce the amount of garbage which is going to the dump, even though that is the stated reason for us having to get them. What is certain is that the total amount of waste material that will be generated by the Town will increase significantly. There will be no reason for those of us who have tried to reduce our waste to continue to do so when we are being forced to pay $25 a month for a service we did not need and would not normally use. What was council thinking or were they thinking at all?
They have opted to penalize the good guys who have been doing their best to reduce their production of waste and to compost their compostable waste and then use the money from them to subsidize those that produce the most waste. Apparently, this makes perfect environmental sense to Mr. Lyons who as someone trained in waste management should know better. The people who will be hardest hit by these new taxes (you can’t call them user fees) will be the older people, often living alone, who generate very little waste and are often least able to keep up with increasing costs of this sort. In our own case, our weekly waste production barely covers the bottom of the garbage container and we compost everything that we can for our garden.
It is not really surprising that the administration chose to implement this costly system rather than look for something that would be fairer and make more environmental sense.
Administrators like simple solutions that create the fewest administrative challenges. It is for the elected members of council to ensure that whatever the administration brings forward is fair and is in the best interests of those who elected them.
In this case Council has failed and one can only hope that at some point they will wake up to the fact.
Chris Mills
Okotoks
