Good grief! Or stronger. What else? We live in a tiny ranching community in Oregon. Our dump has been free since my grandmother lived here. (She died in 1954 at the age of 78)! Traditionally, this dump has been filled and burned and covered up since Caterpillars (sp?) were invented. It has also been used by bird and big game hunters to dump all the animal refuse from miles around that result in the fact that we have thousands of hunters come in to hunt here. My whole family has hunted out here for almost a century, now, and no one in it ever dumped their hunting refuse into the dump. However, this helped to feed the magpies and the other scavengers and the kittens that people couldn't find any other place for.
Soon, as more and more people began to use our highway as a through-route, our FREE dump was discovered. Well, the state put a big sign on the highway and I don't know what they thought they were doing! People began to bring their trash out from the city. Once, even I put an old chair on the edge of it...we did that with stuff we thought someone else might want to recyle...and left. An hour later when I came back with more garbage, it was gone. But this only served to over-fill the dump and it had to be burned and covered more often.
It was always burned. Until some city people bought a small piece of wasteland property up on the hill almost next to the dump. They built a nice house and called the DEQ the next time the dump was burned. You can imagine what happened next. Suddenly, the county commissioners began receiving calls and threats about our county dump management and now we are losing our free dump.
That is not the bad part. Until now, most of us really hadn't given much thought to our own garbage, we were more concerned about the people who were dumping carcasses and offal, and who were releasing the waste from their RV tanks into it! However. Recently, at a meeting with a couple of the county commissioners, we were told that our problems were not of particular concern to them. Even though we pay taxes for garbage removal and as far as we can tell the county has never taken care of this dump or offered any equipment to do so (the State owns the property and has been casually taking care of the burning and covering since no body knows when..., we now must pay horrendous fees to place ugly looking green obtrusive dumpsters on PRIVATE PROPERTY that a rancher is DONATING in an otherwise beautiful, scenic and before this isolated area and the man who has petitioned to come take care of this is being outbid by another garbage magnate, possibly like the one you people are dealing with, and our garbage will be sold to another state.
Apparently our garbage is wanted by somebody because there is big money in garbage these days. We didn't know that. What we DO know is that the "little guy" who would do a good job for us, is being outbid by the "big guy" and the commissioners are forgetting that it will cost us more for our garbage in the long run than we should be paying. We have the cost estimates in front of us. So, who was friends with whom? What can we do to protect our community?
And, what are the hunters going to do next hunting season? We have three areas where a dumpster could be placed. The State Wildlife Area, the Lodge, and the general store. None of them want dumpsters in their yards! Quality of life, you know! But a rancher can donate land and then have to pay the excessive fee to dump his garbage there. We don't know where our taxes are going. We are going to miss all of the dump scavenging we used to do. Garbage disposal is going to cost us more than it would in a city! And we WON'T be recycling, as far as we know.
We don't think our situation is much different from yours. And I wish the people who are being dumped on back there, good luck. I hope you can find some sort of vindication. When you do, I hope you can tell us what to do.
Return to Home Page /
Debate Page