Recycling – Response and Announcement to Run for Board of Health

As the readers of my blog may recall, I had been asked, as a member of the Republican Town Committee, to provide my view on local and general 2012 elections issues. I am a fiscal conservative and see many problems that we have brought onto ourselves due to overregulation and policies that more often than not end with a big fiscal mess that leads to overall dissatisfaction with public services and increasing tax burdens.

We have seen a lot of that in Swampscott and elsewhere and we are just about to add more because we still allow for de facto one-party rule and for administrators to spin policies to achieve pre-determined outcomes independent of what voters may have said. I don’t want to turn this into “Democrats and union leaders are always wrong and Republicans are always right”, especially when it comes to real life issues where good and practical outcomes matter more than party politics at a higher level. It’s important to look at the issues and come up with acceptable compromises. As an elected official in my native country, I felt that I was able to arrive at constructive outcomes across ideological lines without denying my libertarian-conservative view on the issues.

Instead of merely complaining about outrageous policies such as the trash policy, the dealings around the new police station, the problems with flooding and our sewer system, the high school “Chemical Health Policy”, I want to do something about it. Running for local office is the next logical step.

I’ve decided to run for Board of Health for two main reasons:

a)      My professional background in the health care field and past experience with public health issues in an elected office are a good match to the issues faced by the Board of Health.

b)      I am against the Swampscott trash policy and believe that it should never have fallen under the Board of Health ’s jurisdiction.

I’m not opposed to recycling in general (though from an environmental perspective it is important to look at the full picture and many studies have been highly critical of a blanket approach that does not take into account the impact of industrial recycling and its use of energy, etc.). And I am most certainly not opposed to avoiding trash. Our family began recycling even before the trash policy went into effect; as a family of four, we usually only fill one medium-sized trash barrel. What bothers me — and what I hear from many people in town — is the unilateral way this was implemented and how parts of the policy don’t make sense. For example, when I kept using my 50 gallon barrel, parts of my trash were left in the street. I’m only allowed three bags in my larger barrel. I had to buy a smaller 30 gallon barrel that I can now stuff with however many bags as I see fit. I like my 50 gallon barrel better because it has wheels and a good lid that doesn’t fall off. That barrel is now trash, but the question is, can I recycle it? …

So now we can buy stickers for loose trash bags that then sit in the street ready for animals to open and drag around — which I personally see as a public health risk and one I’d like to bring to the table once I’m elected to the Board of Health.

In all seriousness, I think the trash policy should be reversed and reworked. When it comes to savings there are probably better ways of dealing with some of the problems that would still encourage the responsible residents of Swampscott to reduce their trash and to recycle appropriately. There must be a solution other than having to parcel your extra trash out to a neighbor after a spontaneous Super Bowl party. And I am concerned by the underlying ideology which assumes that regular folks can’t be trusted to make their own decisions about what they eat, which health insurance to buy, or even how to dispose of their household waste. I want to be able to tell my kids that we recycle and avoid excessive trash because it’s the right thing to do — and not because my local government forced us to as part of some murky budgetary math.