BIN THERE, DUNCE THAT

BIN THERE, DUNCE THAT: The news that the mayor’s proposed budget contains a provision to start charging for curbside trash collection in 2012 is certain to cause the knee-jerked feet of the “I don’t want to pay for the services I demand” crowd to start up their usual dance of the demented dimwits.

But for anyone who’s paid attention to the last few years of council wrangling over the final R.W. Beck report’s solid waste plan it’s yet another “can’t anyone here play this game” moment from Bernard the Big Babooze’s “ready, fire, aim” compatriots.

Although much to it’s discredit it ain’t no “Zero Waste” study, the final Beck report did manage to include at least one Zero Waste concept on recycling- one that was changed after almost two years of recent community and council criticism that spurred the consultants to go back and recommend a curbside recycling and central sorting process for waste stream reduction.

After endless hours the final report called for the county to first build what’s called a MERF – a materials recycling facility- and then implement a curbside recycling program with separate bins for all recyclables.

Then and only then- once citizens are given the opportunity to easily reduce their and the county’s waste stream- was a plan to implement a fee system for curbside trash pickup to be started.

But one of the council’s recommendations was that the fees should be collected only on a second bin each week in order to incentivize recycling.

The savings in this system are well established. Not only is the trash stream greatly diminished due to the decreased need for landfilling- including all the ancillary operations such as transportation- but the process yields a commodity in the recycled materials.

It’s call a "integrated” process for a reason- each element is based on the other with each one dependant on doing it in the right order- first the facility, then the recyclables collection, then the fees.

But the ever-incompetent Department of Public Works dunderheads first went out and bought a half a million dollars worth of recycling bins and set up a “pilot project” in Lihu`e with no place to bring the collected recyclables. Then instead of using the process to give people a cash reason to recycle they are not only going to charge everyone for the first bin but are going to further remove it from the users’ consciousness by adding it onto the real property tax of the property owners.

While a MERF and island wide curbside recycling is on the horizon they surely won’t be ready by the time the fees kick in.

But why should this time be any different than the others in a series of ignored and un-acted-upon Beck reports we’ve paid for over and over for the past decade or so?

INDECISIVE DREAMIN’

INDECISIVE DREAMIN’: We’re not skilled in dream interpretation but you don’t have to be to figure out the one we had last night right after watching the administration and their consultants’ presentation to the council on the “proposed” new dump location in the middle of the island’s most productive ag land in Kalaheo.

In it, we were having coffee with Mayor Bernard Carvalho and, as he blathered on about what a great mayor he was and how, as he said in his last campaign, “it’s all about leadership”, we stopped hearing him speak and suddenly focused on his moving mouth.

And slowly beyond the gums, over the teeth and through the tonsils and adenoids there it was- the slowly emerging image of Beth Tokioka spinning a silk purse out of a sows ear.

OK not really... but it coulda happened.

For those who haven’t watched the meeting yet, what stood out was the amazing backtracking and finally actual denial- done through the mouth of County Engineer Donald Fujimoto- that the “Umi” site had actually been “selected” by the mayor.

This bit of convoluted 180 could only have come from Tokioka in a desperate attempt to quell the outrage that’s built since Carvalho put his stamp of approval on his task force’s site selection, even touting how he had “done it” where other mayors had failed.

Now that the shibai has hit the fan everyone is running for cover, including Bernard who apparently just “supported the recommendation of his task force” but wasn’t really “selecting” anything... in fact. all the other potential sites are still in play.

That came after, upon council questioning, the consultant admitted that

1) They didn’t really know what was going to be effected or usurped at each potential site due to existing uses- all they did was check the tax maps and zoning.

2) No one even asked the land owners what the availability of their property was and

3) The fact that coffee was growing on the Kalaheo site was not part of the information considered in the “scoring” of each site in their supposed “double-blind” site selection process, one purportedly used to avoid any “NIMBY”- “not in my backyard”- conclusions.

But that “double blind” methodology was a complete joke according to one of the participants we spoke to who said that the members would have had to be total idiots to not know what they were scoring and in fact all of them scored the site(s) in the areas they represented the lowest.

In addition of course, as we could have predicted, their report began with the “fact” that no matter how much reuse, recycling and “transshipment” we will need a new landfill.

But as usual the “why” was conveniently skipped.

So, to get out the old baseball bat and deceased equine, they now have moved from totally ignoring the option of shipping out all the crap we ship in, to acknowledging the possibility but claiming they’ve invented some new kind of opala that can’t be “transshipped” to one of those readily available mainland dumps that are just begging for our discards.

In doing so they’ve moved from “why” we can’t ship it out- especially now that “cost” is not a good answer since Honolulu is doing it for less than it’s costing us per ton now- to “what” exactly is that substance that can’t be shipped out?

Watching the session one can’t help but do what councilmembers did- see a string of those little dollar signs with wings flying away as they listed all the hidden costs of just siting a new landfill, much less opening, running and closing one.

Yet for all the council’s concerns, none of them questioned the consultant’s brief “because I said so” premise for why we need a new dump at all, essentially saying that even with a good zero waste, Max-3R program the shipment of the last few drops to the mainland is impossible for some unstated reason and we still need to dig a hole somewhere and bury all the crap we bring in.

If you buy that, well, we have a bike path to sell ya.

BAG O’ CATS

BAG O’ CATS: The gushing over Sunday’s piece by Mayor Bernard Carvalho’s “Five magic words: I don’t need a bag” commentary in the local newspaper- one we suspect was ghost-written by his top aide and mouthpiece Beth Tokioka- flooded cyberspace yesterday.

“Ditto!!” wrote one environmental activist. “To all of us, we ARE making a difference and this mayor is an example of together, we can!! I'm bowled over!!”

Another couldn’t contain herself saying “OMG thank you thank you thank you thank you and thank you!”.

And of course refusing those nasty and often deadly non-biodegradables floating petro-products is something anyone with a cloth bag can and should do as Diana LaBedz letter today reiterates.

But for the politically astute it’s what Carvalho didn’t say that sticks out like a shearwater’s plastic-distended belly- a promise to support and sign the bill set for public hearing on Wednesday that would ban stores from distributing those nasty pollutants.

As a matter of fact for the more cynical among us it might seem like Carvalho is indeed saying that the real solution is not in the legislation introduced by Tim Bynum and Lani Kawahara but solely in people refusing to accept them and instead bringing their own bags.

Yeah- that’ll work... it’s worked so well that despite years of campaigns by groups like LaBenz’s Surfrider Foundation the bags are more ubiquitous and causing more destruction than ever.

Gee, it couldn’t be because businesses who filled Carvalho’s campaign coffers last November are howling over the prospect of spending a few cents more on the biodegradable bags that are now or soon to be required on Maui, in San Francisco and in any growing number of jurisdictions across the country.

The suspicions are well founded. Carvalho recently has been accused of trying to sabotage the curbside recycling part of the county’s solid waste reform efforts using the county’s standard “fire, ready, aim” operating procedure to institute a “pilot” curbside recycling program in Lihu`e despite the fact that there is no materials recovery facility or MRF yet to accommodate the separation of those collected recyclables.

Why? Well that’s because, according to the administrations solid waste coordinator Troy Tanegawa, purchasing the bins with already appropriated monies was “the low hanging fruit” of recycling efforts.

Of course the crop was nowhere near ripe but politically it will provide a good sounding half truth during November 2010 campaign when Carvalho claims he “instituted curbside recycling”.

While the naive and easily duped might at best see it as the usual county incompetence others see it as a cynical attempt to make sure the pilot program fails so the county can build it’s long-desired “silver bullet” incinerator to burn all our rubbish (supposedly for energy) and in addition build a new landfill- two insanities that result from their refusal to hire a “zero waste” consultant and rather go with good old boy’s favorite consultants R.W. Beck that has been behind the failure to properly deal with solid waste on the island for over 20 years now.

We- and Zero Waste Kauai- been proponents of a full curbside recycling preceded by the construction of a MRF, a “hard to recycle good” facility, composting of green waste and other trash stream reduction measures.

We’ve even suggested shipping the small amount of waste that’s left (some say as low as 10% or less although 20-25% is commonly cited) off island where mainland landfills are fighting over who will get Honolulu’s waste.

We’ve even been proponents of a “ship it in, ship it out” law requiring that larger businesses whose products generate huge amounts of waste to deal with the aftermath.

While some say it’s “unethical” to foist our opala on others they forget that we are in a unique situation where all but our green waste is already shipped in and shipping that stuff out is only the fulfillment of the ecosystem we’ve created.

And, despite 15 years of asking, Beck has never done a full cost analysis of shipping trash including all the secondary and even tertiary expenses of our current land filling adventures although this time they have a brief dismissive paragraph in their latest report.

We can “do” zero waste here- as a matter of fact we’re uniquely situated and circumstanced to make it work. But that would take some vision and ability to grasp a changing paradigm for dealing with solid waste- a can of worms that our politically motivated elected officials have kicked down the road for decades.

Watch out for the Trojan Horse- let the mayor know that telling people to “just say no” is an ineffective substitute for banning the non-biodegradable plastic bags entirely by law.

You can do so at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday (8/19) in the council chambers at the historic county building when bill 2321 is up for pubic hearing . If you can’t make it you can email testimony to counciltestimony@kauai.gov ... and make sure you email a copy to hizzonnah and let him know you expect him to support and sign the bill when it lands on his desk.