Garbage Program Is Garbage, Councillors: BENN

Published 05/13/2023 · Updated 05/12/2023

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So many questions. So few actual answers. That about sums up my assessment of Ottawa’s proposed solid waste plan.

Let’s start with the big picture. Former city councillor Gord Hunter pointed out that city officials have been warning council that Ottawa’s main landfill site on Trail Road has a finite life for more than a couple of decades. Put aside for discussion at a late date staffs’ self-inflicted damage to their own credibility. Focus on the fact that this translates into more than five separate terms of councils that have declined to take care of business. How is this possible? This was not incompetence. This was a dereliction of duty. An explicit decision to not to do what needed to be done.

Does this council have the courage to address the long-term problem, or will they just kick it down the road for another term? That question is posed to the fresh faces who comprise almost half of the people who populate council chamber. We already know, from prior behaviour, what the incumbents modus operandi is.

On to the details.

How many “surplus” bags of garbage are we talking about? Surplus as in more than the arbitrary cut off of two bags per household. Arbitrary as in why is two the golden number?

What is the number of bags at the curb that sees 90 per cent of the households compliant? Less than four, five, six? What is the frequency with which a household that places more than two bags at the curb deemed to be non-compliant. Twenty-six times per year? Twenty? Ten? Five? Once?

The details matter. Because without the details, a prudent city councillor has no idea of how big the problem is, and by extension, whether there is a valid business case for approving the program.

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The City of Ottawa website info says there are about 457,000 households in Ottawa. The 2016 census says only 54 per cent in Ottawa are single-family or townhouse dwellings. The remaining 46 per cent do not participate in the curbside pick-up program. About 74 per cent of the homes eligible for curbside pick up place two or fewer bags per bi-weekly “event”. That means that less than 15 per cent of the households in Ottawa are offending the city’s arbitrary standards. What is not clear is whether the 26 per cent of the households that do not meet the standard are regularly placing three or more bags to the curb, or just sometimes.

Staff estimate the program will cost $1.5 million per year, with the possibility that additional tags will generate up to $450,000 per year, unless their re-education program is wildly successful, in which case the revenue for extra tags will fall. When has the city ever over-promised on a deliverable, and missed a financial target? Frequently.

A prudent councillor or thirteen might also want to ask a few more probing questions.

What constitutes success? If 74 per cent of the households are already compliant, is the threshold 80 per cent, 90 per cent, or 100 per cent?

How many more years will be added to the expected life of the Trail Road site? One? Ten? One hundred?

Before council adds another million dollars to the deficit-ridden operating budget, they should understand what the new program might actually accomplish? Best case? Worst case? Most likely?

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From a financial perspective, the proposed bag-tag program is just another effort to spread the cost associated with addressing a problem of less than 15 per cent of the population. The more than 85 per cent of the households that do not place more than two garbage bags at the curb every second week are be asked to subsidize, to the tune of more than a million dollars a year, a program that will possibly address the less than 15 per cent of the households that put more than two bags at the curb. For a stop gap program that is only necessary because more than five sets of councillors failed, in a willful manner, to do their jobs.

Focus on your job, councillors. Collectively you devote too much time not solving problems outside the city’s area of responsibility. Now is the time to identify a new landfill site. Now is the time to consider incinerators. Incinerators that have not spewed endless plumes of pollutants skyward for decades. Incinerators that can be used to generate electricity. The same tried tested and true solutions that have been used throughout Europe since before the turn of the millennium.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.