Saturday, June 27, 2009

Council to meet again as Trash-Away considers taking legal action - The New Britain Herald (newbritainherald.com)


BY SCOTT WHIPPLE
Posted by Frank Smith at 27.6.09

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe they shouldn't have signed a contract before the people of Berlin approved the deal.

Such arrogance!

June 27, 2009 at 7:47 PM
Anonymous said...

The Bristol Press (bristolpress.com), Serving Bristol, CT

Opinion

OUR VIEW: Political garbage in the way of trash collection

Saturday, June 27, 2009 9:42 PM EDT


What’s a society to do when the people disagree with the government?

What if the government voted to have equal voting rights or integrated schools but the majority of the people wanted neither?

In American history, equal voting rights prevailed, integrated schools is still a work in progress.

How about smaller issues, like, say, trash pick-up. Should the government pick up your garbage or is that an individual responsibility? Certainly the government shouldn’t mow your lawn; you can do it or hire a kid to do it.

In Berlin, like many other communities, it has been decided that garbage pick-up is a government chore. Local taxes pay for it. Other communities leave it up to homeowners to figure out how to get their trash taken away.

But Berlin seems to be in total confusion about trash. The Town Council voted in February to go to an automated system and signed a $1.1 million contract with Trash-Away of New Britain. But last week, a majority of the some 3,700 people who voted in a referendum decided against it.

Everyone already has new, larger trash cans on wheels that Trash-Away spent $800,000 on. Starting July 6, its trucks were supposed to come along and a big mechanical arm would grab the new trash barrels and pour the contents into the truck.

It seems that many residents were just fine with the way Trash-Away had been manually collecting their garbage, under a contract that expires next week, and didn’t much like the bigger trash cans. The people have spoken, 1,964 of them, said “No” to the new system — enough to put everything in limbo.

The Town Council gathered in special session Thursday and didn’t resolved the dilemma. It is going to meet again Monday night.

In the meantime, the announced stop-gap measure is to put big dumpsters at various places around town requiring residents to haul their cans and heft their garbage into the dumpsters. Officials plan to have town workers at these sites to help out.

How long will that work?

The controlling Democrats are feuding with the lone Republican on the council over how all this came about. We might suggest that politics be put aside and the great Berlin garbage debate be settled sooner than later.

URL: http://www.bristolpress.com/articles/2009/06/27/opinion/doc4a46bde8b0a2e347473186.prt

© 2009 bristolpress.com, a Journal Register Property

June 28, 2009 at 9:52 AM

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