At the Feb. 19 County Council meeting, I asked the County Council members and County Executive Charlie Dooley about the implementation of the county’s trash plans.

The primary focus of these questions was about the county health department’s demand to haulers that starting April 1 they must begin charging all customers for the county’s new minimum levels of service — weekly trash pickup, weekly curbside recycling pickup and annual bulk-waste pickup. These charges are to be made regardless of whether customers need or order these services.

My first question was what legal authority gave the county the right to force residents to pay for services if not desired?

I then asked questions about seniors who may not have enough trash to fill even one trash can, residents who voluntarily drop off their recyclables to support school or church groups and residents who travel out of state for up to six months a year and don’t need trash pickups during those periods.

Even if the county had the legal right to enforce these charges, I asked them if they would consider creating exemptions from part of these charges out of a sense of fairness.

In an angry outburst, Mr. Dooley informed me that he had every right to force everyone to pay for these services and that to grant exemptions would reduce the county’s ability to extract the lowest prices from haulers bidding on the trash-district contracts and who needed to be guaranteed how many paying customers they would be getting with the bid. His attitude seemed to be that if these charges were hard economically on some people, that was just tough.

His response saddened me and left me with the sense that with these unfeeling attitudes on the part of so many elected officials, the only avenues left to deal with the trash districting issue are to work to put the question to a vote in November; vote to replace council members who are up for re-election this fall and supporting the trash bill; and then vote against Mr. Dooley and other council members supporting the bill who are up for re-election in another two years.

Anthony Niskanen

south county

Editor’s Note: Mr. Niskanen is the founder of Make Your Opinion Count, LLC, a local group gathering signatures to petition the county to place the question of trash districts on a countywide ballot.