Reevaluating recycling

I haven't talked nearly as much about the New Paltz Recycling Center as I should have.  Hidden behind the highway garage on Clearwater Road, it's so unknown that Google Maps confused it with the BMX track.

Recycling in New Paltz has had a tumultuous history.  When it was part of the highway department, it was never all that clear how much money it was making or losing, or exactly how many deer carcasses town employees dumped around back.  After it was split off and the Hudson Valley Materials Exchange signed a lease, it didn't get much better, because HVME paid little or nothing and again, it wasn't clear how much the place was making or losing.  Now HVME is gone, and the trailers of stuff belong to the town and are sold by the "ReUse Center."

The center makes most of its money by selling bulk scrap metal and other recyclable materials.  The retail aspect could continue to grow, but I think the way the town collects recycling is bass-ackwards.

Town residents shouldn't pay for a permit, and shouldn't pay to dispose of anything that the center can sell for money.  It's insulting to charge me money to drop off something that you can resell.  Make the permit to recycle free, and charge for garbage, period.  The town of Rochester has a free permit, and they keep it free because supervisor Carl Chipman doesn't want his recession-plagued residents to start dumping garbage on the roads.  You can market the free permit and encourage more people to drop off those cash cows.  It's even been suggested to me that the town could invest in a bottle machine, or some other method, that would allow the often-idle employees to collect more money by retrieving deposit bottles.

The center makes money, and even if it didn't, it improves the quality of life in the town by keeping crap off of our roads.  Let's drop the barriers to recycling and increase how much this underutilized service can make.

Recycling roads

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to go down Plains Road with Highway Superintendent Mike Nielson, so I could see what a recycled road looks like.

Plains Road was the first one in New Paltz which was resurfaced by a process that allows for the reuse of the existing asphalt on-site.  Reusing materials is nothing new, but typically the road gets ground up and carted away for reprocessing, and ends up on another road elsewhere in the county.  This equipment allows it to be ground down, picked up, melted, and mixed with some new material right there; then it's laid back down and rolled.

Here's Mike, annoyed that I have a camera but explaining how the whole shebang works:

There are limits to this technology.

• Because of the length of the train, short roads and dead-ends can't be resurfaced like this.
• If there are deep cracks in the road bed, a full replacement will be needed anyway.  Anything that needs to be ground down more than five or six inches can't be replaced this way.
• The process leaves the road pebbly, and it still needs to be sealed, which isn't the case with traditional road replacement.
• Nielson hasn't tested it to see if the results can stand up to our highest-wear roads, like Horsenden. (The fact that we send our truck traffic along that narrow, windy road is another problem entirely.)

I haven't looked at a full cost-benefit analysis, but the benefits to the residents are pretty clear:  a two-week process, including curing, took six hours to complete.  It's also pretty cool to watch:

Making campaign promises is easy.  Fulfilling them, not so much.

Unification isn't the real threat

It's not unification that is most likely to destroy the "way of life" people who live in the village want so desperately to protect - it's the lack of solvent taxpayers.

The village board is trying to find another $300,000 or so in budget cuts, and they're running out of things to even consider.  I was told that they might even consider laying people off - people like the ones that are busting their butts cleaning up after us this week.

I was dumbfounded that the situation is so serious, and asked if they had considered other options to keep the full work force, like furloughs and shortened work schedules and pay cuts.  Less of a job is better than none, I would think.  Apparently the unions don't see it that way, and they aren't willing to reopen the contracts.

Now I'm all for collective bargaining, but if this is true it's a case where the members are not being represented by their union.  How does it help anyone?  $300 might mean four to six people (I'm not sure exactly, because benefits have to be considered in the total employee cost) that are out of work.  It will probably mean the same reduction in services as any of the other options I asked about, but with more people jobless.

The only problem I have with collective bargaining is the idea that you can be required to be a member of the union.  This is why unions sometimes - often - don't have their members' interests at heart.  If employees could freely join and leave - and for that matter, freely create and dissolve a union - then groups like CSEA would see enrollment dip when employers are humans, and rise when they become monsters.  There's no reason why union membership needs to be a protected class, and there's plenty of reasons why it shouldn't.

I wonder if that's a contract negotiation point?

Field Trip to the Recycling Center

So I made a video about going to the recycling center. If I go back I'll try to interview Laura Petit, maybe learn some things I didn't know about the program.

New Paltz New Year

Maybe if I make a list of hopes and dreams for New Paltz in 2009 early enough it won't get lost in the thousands of New Year's posts that will hit the blogosphere next week. This past year I moved back into the village and became part of its non-renting minority, and I'm excited about what the next twelve months will bring to our village and town. Here's an impromptu to-do list for 2009:

1. Shop local more. This could be broadened to do more business locally. We should have told our house painter where to get his paint - he didn't travel far, but even if we had paid just a few more bucks to keep that purchase in town we should have insisted. Two high school kids did an awesome job shoveling out our cars and walk yesterday, and I know that cash will be spent nearby. My brilliant wife suggested tipping the mailman with Chamber of Commerce CertifiChecks.
2. Recycle more. Businesses aren't required to recycle and there's no good reason why not. I applaud Craig Shankles at PDQ Printing for having a strong environmental commitment, but recycling is one of those things that needs a governmental nudge before it makes economic sense.
   
1. Did the EnCC get the Post Office fully on board yet?
2. I want to visit Laura Petit at the recycling center and talk to her about what can and can't be recycled. I bring my stuff there myself, and it's stunning when you compare the list of appropriate items to the stuff that shows up in those dumpsters. Does separating at home work? I'm watching Springfield's pilot recycling program closely.
3. Talk more about unification or whatever you want to call it. Consolidating governments may save money and may make government more efficient and may put the independence and character of the village at risk (which the Town Planning Board can do in all the ways that count under the present system). No one has any really good evidence on either side of the debate because people are stubborn and unwilling to let grant money be spent on finding out. Is Terry Dungan thumbing his nose at us to protect his fiefdom, or is Toni Hokanson rubbing her hands together gleefully at the idea of gaining more land for hers? Can we please find out?
4. Overthrow partisan politics. The idea of even considering a person's political party in a local election is just absurd. Does it really affect how streets are plowed or parking regulated? Far too many people in New Paltz make voting decisions with political party forefront in their mind; both educated and uninformed voters do it. There shouldn't be a fully Democratic town council, and it also should matter that there is! And it's not just the Democrats doing it, either - I've taken several Greens to task for their tunnel-vision mission to avoid voting for a Democrat.
5. Improve this blog. I may not be interested in politics but others are, so I'd like to include at least a Republican or a Libertarian in the gadfly mix. No elected official has asked yet, but if they do, should they be allowed to post? I'd also like to make a cool new banner, but first I need to find a nice picture of the ridge to use. Please comment if you own one that you're willing to donate.
   

Five small goals for me in my community. But hey, I have all year.