Waste not

Waste not

Few services provided by county government with our tax dollars are used by nearly all of us. Not everyone is a student, or a parent with children in the public schools. Many of us will see 20, 30 or 40 years go by before we make use of the zoning department, or the court system. But the landfill and the public dumpster sites, those are used by all of us—everyone creates trash, and everyone needs somewhere to dispose of it.

There are several reasons to close the dumpster sites in Scrabble and Huntly. They are unsightly, unpopular with neighboring landowners, and the county is concerned about liability. There’s one big reason to keep them both open. The public wants them open, as reflected in the petition signatures that have been collected in rapid fashion.

The liability issue, we feel, is a red herring. If the Board of Supervisors’ major concern is that someone will dump a toxic substance into the dumpsters, contaminating, apparently, the landfill, then why aren’t loads being dropped off at the landfill itself being monitored? The long dumpster there is no more closely monitored than those at Scrabble and Huntly, so liability exposure exists there, too. If there have been a rash of lawsuits concerning dumpsters, we certainly aren’t aware of them.

There’s another issue here, that the county might purchase property along U.S. 211-522 between the high school and the bus garage for a solid waste disposal site, a middle school, and future office space needs. But with the middle school in doubt, and the dumpster closings facing such opposition, the need for that land is hardly a given.

Many reasonable people think that the land ought to be purchased no matter how immediate the need for it—it’s an ideal spot, in an area slated to take commercial development, and land isn’t going to get any cheaper. But governments aren’t in the business of speculating on real estate, no matter how good the deal. If the land isn’t needed right now, really needed, it shouldn’t be purchased. In that sense, government is unlike private industry. It might be a good business decision to buy a hundred acres you know you’ll need down the road, but it’s not a sound governmental decision.

So the question remains, why close the Scrabble and Huntly dumpster sites? It may be that the most sensible way to run a solid-waste site is to put it near Washington, the geographical center of the county (and, more or less, the population center), on a four-lane highway, and pay someone to make sure what’s going into our landfill is from Rappahannock residents and is not dangerous. Is that reason enough to make a six-figure land purchase? No. Is it reason enough to make the politically unpopular decision to close sites in Scrabble and Huntly? Again, no.