Speaking of Trash

by Bill McCabe

Published in The Hudson Valley News 4/14/2010

Once or twice a week we put the trash out at the curb or bring it to a re-cycling center. Then we don’t pay a second thought to what happens to it from there. Well, it’s time to start thinking because in the next few months the Dutchess County Legislators and County officials will be making significant decisions that will affect costs, fees, taxes, and the environment in Dutchess County.

Most trash in Dutchess County goes to the County’s incinerator in the Town of Poughkeepsie (just south of the IBM complex) or to landfills outside of the county. A relatively small amount, just 11%, is re-cycled – in contrast to 20% in all of New York State and 32% nationwide. Some municipalities, such as Union Vale with a reported 35% recycling rate, are more conscientious than others, but a mere 11% county-wide is shameful.

Since 1982, the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency (RRA) has had the responsibility to manage solid waste disposal in the county. The RRA is a public agency run by an appointed board and an executive director. A contracted private company does the actual work at the facility. Just about 50% of the county’s trash is burned at the incinerator; this leaves tons of toxic ash and puts an estimated 37,000 tons of carbon emissions into the air annually.

Though the Resource Recovery Agency charges fees for haulers to dump at the incinerator, Dutchess County tax payers have always had to subsidize the plant operations. That subsidy has gone from less than $2 million in 2001 to $6.3 million in 2009. For 2010 the County Executive has proposed removing this subsidy from the regular budget, to be replaced by fees assessed on each household and business in the county and paid as a separate “user fee” added to our annual property tax bills. This fee/tax could raise over $8 million to cover this year’s deficit and other costs of “improvements” to the incinerator. That is a lot of money to be raised from taxpayers, and the County Legislature has so far, appropriately, refused to endorse this new tax scheme.

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GETTING BEYOND BP

by Bill McCabe

Published in The Hudson Valley News 6/23/2010

After two months of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, now estimated by government scientists at an astonishing 2.1 million gallons per day, British Petroleum joins an infamous list of multi-national companies demonstrating high levels of corporate greed and insensitivity to the common good.
BP joins the corporate irresponsibility of Enron in California, Exxon in Alaska, Texaco in the Amazon, the investment banks on Wall Street, GE in the Hudson River, and Union Carbide in Bhopal, India. Motivated by the urge for more and more profits, these entities have brought economic environmental and/or economic ruin to so many who mistakenly trusted large corporations to do the right thing. These corporations, as well as others over the years, took short cuts, put lives in jeopardy, and did their best shift blame.
BP is one of the most profitable corporations (with $240 billion in revenues and $17 billion in earnings in 2009 according to the NY Times) in an industry that churns out more profits than any other industry in history. The oil continues to gush, more beaches and wetlands are destroyed each day, and experts warn that by late August the Atlantic seaboard from the Florida Keys to Long Island and Cape Cod can expect oil slicks on the beaches, bans on fishing, and contamination of wetlands. BP, with the collaboration of Halliburton’s faulty concrete and Transocean‘s faulty “failsafe” systems, took advantage of the deregulation policies instituted in the Bush-Cheney years and chose reckless risks to enhance profits.

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