Rhino's Ramblings: Goodbye Garbungle
Robert Thomas
After 16 months and seemingly endless hours of debate at Council, it now appears the transition to curbside conversion may have finally hit the political landfill, and for more than a few, hopefully it will be buried in the rubble.
This is the issue which tied down City Hall and despite some great empirical evidence from the Engineering Department that curbside was actually saving money, there was simply no way of convincing a good portion of residents that was, in fact, true.
Throughout the debate what was learnt from councillor comments was that curbside was an initiative of Administration.
With Matt Noble’s departure, the greatest defender of the initiative was gone and soon afterwards the entire plan started to rapidly decay. The greatest question you might have is why?
It is relatively simple: Mr Noble, in this scribes own opinion, was a veteran of the politics that surrounds councils. He had lived through a couple of great controversies in Swift Current, where there was some fairly strong opposition.
After Mr Noble’s departure, really what was left were not people who are political. They are really just a bunch of ordinary people trying to do a job under some very tough circumstances. And given what I heard at budget they know what needs to be done they simply need the money to do it. Money that is increasingly difficult to come by.
The task they have ahead of them is monumental and it really is a game of luck and hope that somehow they can keep an almost literally duct taped city infrastructure holding together as they replace what needs to be done.
But getting back to curbside, I remember writing a column for the now defunct Moose Jaw Times-Herald where I stated that even though it looked like curbside was inevitable, whether the garbage made it to the curb and into the truck was yet to be seen. Most people snickered when I wrote that but then again this is Moose Jaw politics. In many ways it’s different than many other communities.
In the eyes of many, democracy worked; and after a long hard struggle, curbside was defeated. While for others what we have just witnessed was rule by mob. Either way you look at it it’s been a tumultuous few months to state the least.
One thing I did notice about all of this though is there were at least a few people on social media who had been transitioned over to curb side and were happy with it. They have no idea what happened in two short weeks to cause such a dramatic reversal in the way Council voted from Executive Committee to what happened at last Monday night’s Council meeting.
I did some checking and unless you read the story I wrote about the meeting facilitated by Citizens Advocating Sustainable Taxation (CAST), prior to the final Council vote, there really was very little out there about an intensive lobbying campaign going on in the background. In my opinion, that campaign, which utilized widespread dissatisfaction with Council (for ignoring the 85 percent of affected residents surveyed who did not want curbside) was the final nail in the initiative’s coffin.
The meeting CAST facilitated wasn’t advertised and the only publicity of it was a short story in the MJ Independent.
Was it a secret meeting with lots of secret stuff going on? Nope, not at all. I showed up uninvited and it was no big deal. I found out about it from a social media post and showed up on my own accord to report on it. If there had been a meeting supporting curbside I would have done the same.
Really, it was citizen action and basic grassroots democracy which ended curbside.
Now, here is the big kicker. I was in an area which had previously converted to curbside and, personally, I PREFERRED it and actually OPPOSE the transition back. I don’t have a garage, so curbside meant I never had to shovel out the back yard. There is plenty of space on my driveway for the bins during the Winter. Sigh……..
But it is not my role to cheerlead on the Council stuff. I simply write everything down that’s said and it’s up to the reader to hold their elected officials accountable and vote with their own conscience.