The White Street Landfill and “responsible government” mutually exclusive?

I commend Councilman Mike Barber for recommending the current City Council reassess the decision of a former City Council concerning the White Street Landfill. Having come to distrust Greensboro City Council members I can only hope Mr. Barber is sincere and this is just not a politically correct ploy in which he knows the other council members will not agree. It seems to me Mr. Barber has made several statements and motions during the past months for this (politically correct ploy) purpose since he seems not to have followed thru on any of these issues. Perhaps he did more in Closed Sessions, I don’t know and neither does anyone else except the other City Council members. In fact, we the public know very little about the thoughts and actions of Greensboro City Council members because they insist on conducting the city’s business behind closed doors.

At any rate I do applaud Mr. Barber for this motion and hope he carries thru and pushes for a re-assessment of the actions taken in the past. The White Street Landfill should never have been closed to household trash in the first place. It was closed to household trash because people who had homes in the area demanded something be done about the odor and flies. The fact that the landfill was started in 1940 and the homes came much later so the people who bought these homes were surely aware of the odor and the flies when they first visited the home sites seems not to have been considered when the decision to close the landfill to household waste was made in 2001.

The people who purchased homes after 1940 paid less for their homes because this was obviously a less desirable area in which to live. Location! Location! Location! Home owners pay for location. Having a home within 500 feet of a landfill is indeed a bad location, but when the residents of Nealtown Farms filed suit against the city in November of 1995 their homes were only five years old. The odor, the flies and the cheaper houses were all part of Nealtown Farms from the very beginning. (see N & R article and landfill time line)

The suit that the residents of Nealtown Farms brought against Greensboro claimed environmental racism. Those who voted to close the landfill to all but industrial waste did so to appease a certain small segment of the community at the cost to the rest of the community for purely political reason and against common sense, consideration of all citizens living and paying taxes in Greensboro and the two outside expert opinions concerning the use of the White Street landfill. This is a huge expense to pass on to those who paid much more for their homes by choosing to buy elsewhere. Now several million of our tax dollars are being extorted from us merely to increase the value of the homes of those who deliberately purchased in a less desirable area and therefore cheaper homes.

Bill Knight reminded and informed us in the N&R article comments that “The city commissioned an engineering study in 1995/96 that was later updated in 2001 concerning the White Street landfill. The study recommendation was continuation of the landfill project as the least expensive of four options: 1) resource recovery; 2) White St. continuation; 3) a new in-county landfill; 4) an out-of-county disposal. The fourth option is the one that is being used by the city, and it is roughly 73% more expensive to operate, on a per household basis, than the White Street landfill. The study can be found on the city website.”

Knight went on to say, “I have spoken with several former department heads and a former member of engineering about the White St. landfill. All said basically the same thing: White St. has many years of useful life remaining, and it contains superior technology for dealing with household waste disposal. The city manager (Mitch Johnson) failed to mention the expended costs on White Street that are lost in moving to a transfer system. Someone paid for the White Street capital improvements: do you want to guess who?” So the city was doing all that was possible to decrease the negative aspects of a landfill and tax payers had paid for these improvements. The city also agreed in June 1996 to cover any losses suffered by home owners if they could not sell their homes. So anyone who wished to remove themselves and their families from the odor and flies and unhealthy conditions of living near a land fill could sell their home and leave. This too at the Greensboro tax payers expense. I have so often wondered why governments always seem to force the rest of us to rescue fools from their own folly!

I was especially put off by the claim of “environmental racism” charged in the Nealtown Farms suit in 1995 and again being claimed and repeated since Mike Barber made this latest proposal. I am so tired of the race card being used again and again in Greensboro/Guilford! It really is getting old. That the majority of the people living in the area are Black is not anyone’s fault but their own. In the late 1980’s when these homes were built the time was long past when Blacks were forced to live in certain areas of towns. Where is the logic of Blacks charging racism when only their own actions are involved?

Mike Barber asked City Manager Mitch Johnson to compare costs of using White Street Landfill to using the transfer station and then shipping our garbage 70+ miles (143 mile round trip for our trucks) to another landfill in another county. Mitch Johnson, as we have seen with the Wray case and subsequent cases that involved Blacks in the GPD, is very considerate of the Black community’s desires so I was not at all surprised of his initial estimate was the difference would be no more than $3 million. This is such a patently stupid statement! Collecting the garbage from homes and then having the same trucks deliver the garbage directly to the city’s own landfill as opposed to collecting the garbage taking and dumping it at the transfer station. Then reloading the garbage and trucking it 70+ miles. And he estimates that the difference in cost will only be $3 million dollars. In a pig’s eye!

Mitch Johnson went on to point out how very costly overcoming permitting hurdles was going to be. Bill Knight addresses this very nicely, “Overcoming landfill permitting hurdles seems inconsequential when compared to a potential cost savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 30-40 years. The need for responsible municipal financial management and lower tax rates far outweighs the concerns of any one neighborhood. This is what responsible government is all about.”

I could only wish that Greensboro had a “responsible government”. BB