Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 9, 1991 TAG: 9104120912
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Kevin Kittredge
DATELINE: CLAYTOR LAKE LENGTH: Long
I am single, a slow consumer, an eater-in-restaurants. I buy garbage bags that fill up slowly in my kitchen, then make their way to my screened-in back porch, and eventually to the Ingles Mountain Landfill. The journey can take months.
I made my first landfill trip of the new year late in March. On March 21, to be precise.
I am not usually precise about things like garbage _ but in this case I have a receipt with a date.
The receipt is for $5.40 on March 21. And it is stamped "Paid."
To recap:
March 21. $5.40. "Paid."
This was a first. They had never charged me at the landfill before, just waved me toward a row of dumpsters to the side of the gate. I would get out, good deal.
Still, I didn't mind paying $5.40 this time. There are no free lunches, after all.
My 11 weeks of refuse, the receipt said, had totaled a piddling 240 pounds.
I went home, nothing but a slight reek from the back of my Escort to remind me where I'd been.
A week later, I got another reminder in the mail _ a bill for $30.
The bill was from the Pulaski County Public Service Authority. It was for garbage, January through March.
In my logic, I had just paid.
I reacted reasonably, I think. I tossed the bill to the floor of my car.
There it lay for a week or more, until I picked it up and looked at it again.
It still said the same thing. But at the top of the page, I noticed this time, it also said "Questions about your bill?" There were two telephone numbers.
I dialed the first number _ and got an answering machine. "At the sound of the tone," etc.
I hung up.
I tried the second number, and a woman answered. Someone with a nice voice.
about your garbage?" she asked. "Let me ring someone who can help you."
Back to the answering machine.
This time I waited it out. At the end of the message came a sound like a dump truck makes backing up: "Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep."
It was a pretty day. I hung up the telephone and drove to Pulaski County.
At a reception desk in the county's office building, a nice woman directed me to the office of Joe Morgan, the county administrator.
There I was quickly humbled.
Since January 1, Morgan said, the county has been charging everyone in the county for the use of the landfill. The fee is ten dollars per household per month.
If i elect not to use the landfill, I can pay 85% of that fee, Morgan said.
But no one is exempt.
The reason for the hardball tactics, Morgan explained, is the skyrocketing cost of landfills. And by charging everyone, the county hopes to discourage those who scatter their garbage all over the county's pretty countryside, or dispose of it in other unsanitary ways.
In other words, Pay Up.
Worse, Morgan informed me the issue had been thoroughly covered in my own newspaper.
And indeed it has. This newspaper's library lists eleven stories on the Ing Ingles Mountain Landfill just since January.
In my defense, I do read my newspaper. I get one at home, and usually pluck one from the receptionist's desk at the office as well. I may go through the newspaper several times a day for one reason or another.
But there are stories _ the ones about murders, and the ones about landfills _ that I usually don't pay attention to. Both represent intractable human problems I would just as soon forget.
But thirty bucks will usually make me take notice.
Wasn't that a little high for a single load of garbage? I asked Morgan.
The point is, said Morgan, that they provide garbage pickup whether I use it or not. The truck rumbles by my house at Claytor Lake, it takes its load of trash back to the landfill.
And landfills, in these days of toxic waste and leachate and other gunk, are beginning to rival Lamborghinis in cost per square inch.
"Trash is major cash," Morgan said. "And it will be in the '90s."
But thirty bucks?
Besides, I asked, what about the $5.40 I already paid at the landfill to dispose of my first load of 1991 trash?
Morgan allowed that I shouldn't have been charged. "We are still debugging the system," he said.
Complicating things, apparently, were my Rockbridge County sticker - I moved to Pulaski County in July 1990, but was taxed in Rockbridge County that year and did not get a Pulaski County sticker until late last month - and the fact that I rent my house.
In fact, a quick records check showed that my landlord had been paying the home pickup fee for me all along. The bill for the first quarter of 1991 was the first to arrive in my name.
There are indeed no free lunches.
Morgan struck the $5.40 from my bill. The rest - $24.60 - is due April 15, he said.
Morgan said there is a proposal to reduce the garbage fee for people who don't generate much garbage. He said I would probably qualify.
Meanwhile, I'll let the garbage trucks take my trash.
by CNB