THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 1, 1996 TAG: 9605010002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
By nearly every measure, people are becoming more aware of the need to protect the environment. Nations, states and cities have enacted legislation and implemented programs to clean up and preserve planet Earth.
The National Recycling Coalition in Northern Virginia reports that in 1988 only 1,000 U.S. cities provided convenient curbside recycling for households. Six years later that number had jumped to 7,000.
Make that 6,999 now. Virginia Beach City Council voted last week to buck the national trend toward making recycling as easy as putting out the trash by bowing out of its curbside pickup arrangement with Southeastern Public Service Authority (SPSA).
The straw that broke the Beach's back was a vote by the SPSA board of directors to charge a $1 per month/per household fee for the bi-weekly service. City officials balked when they were faced with an estimated $1.3 million in new fees which were not addressed in the proposed city budget.
We would remind council that it is not too late to remedy this. The proposed budget is not even scheduled for a vote until later this month.
Part of the job of city government is to raise revenue and set priorities. By scrapping curbside recycling, rather than finding the money to pay for it, the city is sending a powerful message that everything else it spends money on is more important than the environment.
When curbside recycling ends in July you can be sure of one thing: Many of the residents who now save newspaper, glass and plastic items in their handy blue bins will instead dump the recylables into the garbage. Not everyone wants to haul refuse in backseats to one of the 50 drop-off points the city promises to establish by summer.
Even the city's recycling coordinator had a one-word answer when asked if she really believed that all the people who now recycle will continue to do so when they have to drag the stuff to drop-off centers.
``No,'' conceded Debra C. Devine.
The city seems surprised by a public outcry in favor of curbside recycling. On Monday, Devine said that this new 100 percent drop-off program was really just a ``stop-gap measure'' while experts studied how to improve curbside recycling. But they have no date by which the study will be complete and curbside recycling will begin again.
This looks suspiciously like backpedaling by city officials who reckoned the citizens cared as little for the envirnment as they apparently do. If council backpedals, we applaud it.
No one said that keeping the city clean would be cheap. In fact, it would be a big money-saver if people just tossed their trash out of their windows rather than paying for weekly garbage pickup. But the city decided a long time ago that it did not want to be awash in trash.
Virginia Beach should keep SPSA curbside recycling while it explores less-expensive curbside alternatives.
The cost to the environment and the city's progressive reputation will be infinitely more expensive than $1 per household per month if curbside recycling is dumped.
The decision to terminate curbside recycling was short-sighted in the extreme. by CNB