Mayor Neil Driscoll is urging township residents to lobby for the extension of rural garbage and recycling pickup across Wellington County.
Currently, garbage and recycling pickup is provided, every other week, to rural residents of Erin and Guelph-Eramosa, but not in other rural areas of the county.
At a public budget open house in Moorefield on Jan. 14, Driscoll said he favoured extending the service to all rural residents in Wellington.
Driscoll said when he inquired about the idea, staff indicated it could be quickly implemented. However, “committee chairs say we’d have to go through a three-year study to see if it makes sense to pick up garbage and recycling in the whole county.”
Driscoll urged township residents to contact their representative, Ward 2 councillor Gregg Davidson, or solid waste services committee chair Don McKay, if they are in favour of extending the service.
Driscoll pointed out without pickup, rural residents often don’t take advantage of county recycling programs.
“If we’re not picking up garbage and recycling in rural municipalities we’re not recycling,” he said.
A two-year pilot program that saw garbage and recycling picked up in Minto and Guelph-Eramosa every other week resulted in the service being discontinued in Minto in December 2008 due to lack of participation. Only 22 per cent of rural Minto residents took advantage of the service at the time.
The service was continued in Guelph-Eramosa, which doesn’t have a landfill or waste transfer station within its boundaries. Participation there was almost double that in Minto.
In Erin, rural garbage pickup has been provided since the closure of a transfer station in Hillsburgh in May of 2010.
The issue of extending the service county-wide is already on the political radar, said McKay.
He explained the idea has been listed as a “top priority” in a strategic plan review of county solid waste.
Staff are expected to complete a rural pickup analysis and come back in March with a recommendation “looking at a cost/benefit analysis of whether we have rural pickup across the whole county.”
McKay also said he will be accompanying staff on visits to member municipality councils in the next few weeks “with regard to the solid waste strategic plan and our intentions.”
In addition, he said a questionnaire will be sent out to county residents “asking what they feel about rural pickup.”
While conceding the current timeline for completing the strategic analysis is about two and a half years, “that doesn’t preclude that if there is an appetite and an interest there by the residents that want to see something sooner, and if that committee felt it was appropriate to put in place sooner, that we could do that.”
However, McKay said, “We want to make sure that residents have an opportunity for input into what we’re doing so it’s not a knee-jerk reaction.”
Part of the reason for the longer timeline, said McKay, is the county’s contract with the current waste services provider ends in 2018.
“Just before we would have to RFP for a new contract, we would have some pretty good ideas on maybe how things could change,” McKay pointed out.
