Neighborhood Traffic Managment Program. The City recently introduced a neighborhood traffic management program that gives us more tools and resources to solve dangerous traffic problems in neighborhoods. This is a reminder that the second round of applications are due on Monday, December 1. Don't forget to turn in your applications.Trash. I've catching up on my emails and noticed several emails from constituents wanting to know just what the heck we were doing trying to take over commercial trash hauling in the city. Seems like there have been some newspaper ads and some notices from the Wastehaulers Association to individual businesses asking people to contact us to set us straight on the issue.
First off, while there was some conversation about what the advantages might be to the City taking over commercial waste hauling, I don't think this would be a real benefit or priority for the city and it isn't really the problem that we need to be prepared to solve.
I wanted to make sure everyone knew what we were working on and to let you know that it has much less to do with commercial trash hauling and much more to do with landfills. About two months ago, Environmental Services came to the City Council and said, "We might have a problem." Commercial waste hauling is a private affair in El Paso. Most of the waste from businesses goes to the Sunland Park Landfill in Sunland Park, New Mexico. The landfill recently applied for a 10 year permit to keep things going and the State of New Mexico responded with a one year permit, leaving in doubt the future of that landfill. While it is certainly not a settled deal--the landfill have vowed to fight the one year permit and has followed up with another 10 year permit application and the residents of Sunland Park have vowed to continue to fight the landfill--it leaves El Paso with a big question that we need to be prepared to answer. If the landfill is not granted its application, what do we do with all of that commercial trash?
If we have to build capacity in our landfills for that waste, we will probably need to re-0pen the McCombs landfill in Northeast El Paso. The upfront capital for preparing a landfill is pretty hefty so Evironmental Services would like us to consider an ordinance called flow control which would assure that we had enough revenues to cover those upfront costs and the ongoing operational costs. Flow control allows a city to mandate that all of the waste produced in a city is dumped in municipally-owned landfills. This would guarantee that all people producing waste in the city are contributing towards the costs of opening and maintaining the landfill and would therefore spread those costs over a larger customer case. So Environmental Services was given the go ahead by Council to look a little deeper into the costs of having to re-open McCombs and just how we would go about paying for this with the future of the Sunland Park landfill being in question.
Here is a little more background on the issue from Newspapertree. El Paso Times has covered the issue also but they don't archive their stories.
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