City protects local dumping interests

Where to send the potentially dangerous waste from the Sinclair demotion? Here is the distasteful picture I take from The Gazette's coverage.

Private contractors foolishly try to save

$4 million by taking it to a lower-cost private landfill in Illinois, one that complies with all landfill regulations. The city disqualifies these contractors and reopens the bidding, insisting that the waste must go to the old reopened downtown dump. Why should the city care about the cost; the federal government is paying, so just ring it up on the federal debt.

Anyway, you see, the old linerless dump is actually quite safe after all. Never mind that the state Department of Natural Resources has historically protected powerful city and county interests in their local dumps; or that federal authorities finally forced the state to make the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency shut down its old downtown dump when they discovered it had long taken waste in violation of federal environmental law; or that The Gazette never reported that inconvenient bit of history. After all, it's merely federal law; our old public dump is safer by definition than any modern private landfill, city officials assure us.

But why waste time to spell it out? I've learned how useless it is to challenge the interlocking city hall-local waste agency power complex. This is just how Cedar Rapids politics work, certainly when it comes to disposing of waste.

Don Cell

Mount Vernon