Letter to the editor submitted by Steve Brown, Cos Cob
The first problem is the amount of trash Greenwich generates. What follows is getting rid of trash is expensive. Very expensive. That is the problem to address and Tipping Fees does less than ZERO to address that problem.
Tipping fees are all tactic and no strategy and Greenwich is supposedly a leader in the State. Instead it wants to follow other communities that have gone down the crooked path of tipping fees, a path that will lead to the dead end where trash will become an existential threat to municipal budgets. Every year tipping fees will go up and every year customers will pay more. The haulers themselves are against it.
If you are not addressing the amount of garbage the Town generates you are not doing anything to solve the problem. You’re simply moving money around to hide a lack of vision. Greenwich generates more garbage that its peer communities, Fairfield and West Hartford by 40% and 60% respectively. The tonnage it generates hasn’t budged since 2014 and there is ZERO incentive with Tipping Fees for residents — and all businesses, most of which can’t be bothered to recycle — to reduce their trash.
Tipping fees is mute about all of this because what it lacks in imagination to solve the long-term, systemic problems Greenwich has, it’s answering with what is basically a page out of Soviet-era communism: one size fits all, everyone will pay more and the problem will remain the same.