Civics 101
I commend Commissioner Pam Hemminger for clearly speaking the truth at the Orange County Board of Commissioners meeting on Dec. 11. She said that if you read all the information objectively, a decision to place a waste transfer station (WTS) in Bingham Township is categorically wrong.
Unfortunately, unfounded fear prevailed, with the rest of the board that was present. So Orange County will soon haul all of the trash generated by the cities as far away as possible on two-lane rural roads into southwest Orange, only to haul it off to distant landfills in Eastern North Carolina or Virginia.
The resulting civics lesson on county government from the event:
Regardless of how faulty your premise, criteria, process or conclusion, stick with it so you can say you stuck with it.
If a community doesn’t have a mayor or town council, they lose.
The board is powerless in the face of municipalities.
Even if the public hands you workable, progressive solutions, don’t investigate them. It might make you and your paid consultants look foolish.
It doesn’t matter how large a carbon footprint you make as long as it lands squarely on the least powerful group of people.
Praise the great public input you receive while summarily dismissing it.
It’s better to waste $10 million on a mistake than to admit you made one.
Even if the last community group gets less than a month to be heard, if you have been at the process a year, say that’s enough.
Better to spend the next few months negotiating with an unreasonable landowner and fighting legal action than open the process to find better sites.
You can decry the injustice of “urban imperialism,†but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it yourself.
You can change the process as many times as you want when it suits you, but not when it doesn’t.
I witnessed that night the worst of government — that soulless way of following rules even when they lack all sensibility and reason. Decisions made out of fear and desperation are never good ones.
Yes, this was a difficult situation. But with every crisis comes an opportunity to move in a new direction. The board failed to capitalize on the moment. As a result, an entire community will suffer. And the county is further away from its self-image of being “progressive.â€
Today I loaded up my own trash and recycling and drove to the solid-waste station seven miles away. That’s what we do here in the county.
Virginia Leslie
Within a mile of the future WTS in SW Orange