HRM Waste Mismanagement

Why do we have to put paperboard in the compost? It’s perfectly recyclable yet the garbage guys won’t pick it up in a blue bag. How is it that corrugated cardboard and newspapers/magazines are recyclable but not paperboard like cereal boxes? That is actually most of the stuff I throw away. What a pathetic excuse for a recycling program when they tell you to put all those boxes in the compost. Might as well just cut down the province’s trees and throw them directly into the compost bin.

Also, why do we have to personally transport electronics to the ACES sites? What do we pay taxes for, to buy Peter Kelly a new house after he gives himself another raise, that overpaid putz? Why can’t they pick them up at the curb and then take them to the recycling centers? Not everybody has a pickup truck, or even a car. So now we find TVs and computer monitors abandoned all over the damn place because the overpaid garbage collectors won’t touch it. I literally despise the HRM garbage system. It’s pathetic and extremely inconvenient. Since they are so picky about what you put in the blue bags now I just put every damn thing in the black bags. The bastards will pick it up now, won’t they!

I can’t wait for Peter Stoffer to take Peter Kelly’s job, give himself a 4% pay decrease and fix the garbage system. Kelly has done nothing but increase his pay since he became Mayor, aside from making an ass of himself by speaking publicly with an atrocious stutter. I guess he didn’t expect public speaking to be involved in the job of Mayor when he decided it would be a good idea to run for the position and I guess none of the people who actually voted for him did either. What does that say about HRM’s citizens that they would elect such a misfit? Now we’re the laughing stock of all cities in the world. If you stutter, don’t go into politics or start a talk show, pretty simple. Now if he were a particularly great politician, it might be forgivable, but he’s not.

They also need to get rid of about half of the Councilors, who are also overpaid. I don’t care what they make in other cities. Those other cities almost certainly have higher average incomes than HRM. There just aren’t enough important issues in HRM to need that many Councilors or to pay them that much. The Mayor’s salary should not be more than $100,000, and even that’s too high. Your time is short, Kelly. As soon as one other person actually runs against you you’re gone! I don’t care if it’s Stoffer or the devil himself, as long as the devil doesn’t give himself any pay raises. —Joe Halifax

This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2010.