Dear Editor,
[RE: LETTER – Taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize garbage pickup, Feb.18, www.mapleridgenews.com]
I read with interest the letter from a reader regarding their thoughts on municipal garbage collection.
I am a former sanitation worker for a large municipality, and I spent over a decade operating and loading garbage and recycling trucks.
I have always been in favour of municipal waste collection, of both garbage and recyclable materials.
I believe that any community is best served by a standardized and consistent collection service. A patchwork system of different refuse collectors doesn’t benefit the majority of citizens.
It leads to inconsistent service standards and the municipality has little to no control over the service.
A municipal refuse/recycling service would ensure that all citizens have access to a high quality collection and disposal process.
It would certainly go a long way toward eliminating the mounting problem of surreptitious dumping of waste into various side streets, vacant lots, and ditches that currently exists.
Of course, there will always be scofflaws who don’t care about the environment or the impact their unsightly messes have on our community, but such behaviour would be reduced since disposal of garbage would be easier with city-wide collection.
I do agree with the reader in his opposition to hiring a private contractor to provide any collection services.
It is a consistent truth that private, for-profit companies that engage in providing a public service – whether it be waste collection, long-term health-care, transportation services, or any other number of services do so with profit as motivation – which comes at the expense of quality of service and, ultimately, cost to taxpayers.
There are many documented instances in the Lower Mainland municipalities where a city decided that they would rather not provide these services and contracted them out, only to bring them back in-house within a few years.
Why? In many cases the private contractors underbid the actual costs of providing the waste collection services so that they could gain access to a contract. Over a few short years the costs increased to the point where it was no cheaper for the municipality than if it had provided the service with its own municipal workers.
Quality of service has also been a significant driver of in-house municipal collection.
If the municipality controls all aspects of the service, then it can ensure that citizens receive appropriate and high quality treatment. There’s nothing worse for a municipality than to receive complaints about collection services and be unable to properly deal with those complaints because of the nature of the contract with the service provider.
There is another benefit to in-house collection services and that is the workers who provide these services are properly trained, health and safety standards are appropriately applied and those workers receive decent wages and benefits including pensions.
Simon Challenger, Maple Ridge
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