MAILBAG - April 11, 2008

Hauler should go ‘green’ or risk penalty

What’s blocking Laguna Beach from becoming “green”? Answer: Waste Management.

The April 4 article “City seeks answers,” Lumberyard Logs, Coastline Pilot, refers to the fact that Waste Management continues to delay providing recycling service to 280 Laguna Beach homes.

Now, once again, I am not surprised but disappointed that Waste Management has allegedly come up with the figure of a “700% safety improvement” since they limited some roads to “one garbage truck takes all” pickup.

After all, this dialogue has been going on since August of 2007, seven long months ago.

The only previous figure they’ve used was a reference to one driver who had a stroke or heart attack on one curvy street. And they used that as an excuse to cease sending a recycle truck down a myriad of streets that formerly saw both a trash and a recycle truck.

And why haven’t they accepted the recommendation that Steve May, our director of public works, ride with Waste Management to mutually evaluate just how perilous are these “precipitous and winding” roads?

Perhaps there are a few, but not anything like front 280 homes. And certainly Point Place, and many others, do not fit their description.

I for one am so tired of our city being jerked around by Waste Management.

Just what hold do they have over our city?

Despite your article stating that “Arnold isn’t terribly optimistic that he’ll ever get recycling service back on his tiny, beach-adjacent street,” I do have confidence in Steve May and in our City Council that they will not fall for this latest shenanigan, and that they will compel Waste Management to live up to its lucrative agreement.

This is why several of us on Point Place have continued all summer, fall, winter and to the present day to keep our recyclable material separate from the trash, only to see both bins dumped into the same garbage truck, week after week, month after month.

It may take another several weeks, but I do expect to finally see in May a “green” Waste Management recycling truck once again come down our short, straight Point Place, as it has for most of the now-eight years I’ve lived here. (This being the third time Waste Management has unilaterally stopped providing the recycling service in the hope that no one would notice.)

Well, listen up, Waste Management: Get “green,” or our City Council may agree that you have violated your five-year contract.

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Laguna Beach