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by Barry Henderson
Recycling: the Conservative Option
The return of curbside pickup of recyclables to the city is a positive development in a long-term dilemma over what Knoxvillians ought to be doing with the reusable resource materials that otherwise become part of their household trash and are buried in the landfill.
A pilot curbside recycling project in test neighborhoods 15 years ago fizzled because of a lack of participation and because the market for recyclables was glutted at the time.
Since then, the market has matured somewhat for paper products, aluminum and steel cans, and glass and plastic containers. Still, the program will not pay for itself. Waste Connections, the city’s regular trash-collection contractor, will be gradually instituting citywide curbside recycling pickup—neighborhood by neighborhood—at a fee of $3.50 per month per household, and will supply the necessary containers for a one-time outlay of $10.
There is every indication, based on the amount of recycling done at drop-off centers around Knoxville, that curbside participation will be better now than before, and that the city may benefit in real terms from the amount of waste products diverted from the Chestnut Ridge landfill, where ultimate capacity remains in question.
After all, recycling is the conservative thing to do. It reduces the amount of natural resources spent on manufacturing of a wide variety of products. Trees cut to produce paper is only one example, though perhaps the best known and understood.
Keep your Courthouse ‘Secure’
The security clampdown at the City County Building, coupled with the switch of the KAT bus transfer point to Main Street in front of the building, has reduced the number of metered on-street parking places within a block of the building and the Courthouse to about a half-dozen, not counting a similar number designated for vehicles with handicapped tags. That comes after the City County Building’s internal garage has been closed to the public for the last couple of years, again out of security considerations. Hundreds of ordinary citizens need access to that complex daily, and they are met with increasing hassles and inconveniences in the name of questionable security considerations.
Without minimizing the threat of terrorism in the post-9/11 era, there has to be some way of demonstrating to the Public Building Authority that the odds against a municipal government becoming a target of terrorists are extremely low. And in the unlikely event that such a terrorist plot were hatched, your garden-variety terrorist is likely smart enough to steal a vehicle with garage privileges, load it up with explosives, and go from there to kingdom come, taking our government and many of its people and patrons with it. That’s just an ugly truth. Keeping the general public out won’t prevent it from happening.
The fact of the matter is that the PBA’s restriction on public parking, and its new insistence on searching all of the City County Building’s users who do not bear special passes, means that fewer people can easily avail themselves of municipal services, or are discouraged from doing so.
Rudeness among the security personnel empowered with search-and-confiscate power is also discouraging. When a guard says, “Try to bring that nail clipper in here, and you’ll never see it again,” the whole security purpose of weapons searches is mocked. People have been badgered over whether their key chains constitute a weapon. A lawyer who visits the building daily was greeted on a first-name basis by a guard who then required him to return to his home to get the security pass he’d forgotten or surrender a pen knife he’d carried as a memento for 30 years.
It’s gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. What’s some armed-and-dangerous malcontent going to do, wrestle a chancery court clerk to the floor and clip her nails to the quick?
One wonders whether city and county employees, officeholders and judges who have been quoted as saying they appreciate the restrictions are feeling more secure, or whether they’d just as soon the bothersome public be kept out of their halls so they’ll have less to do.
Unclear on the ‘Team’ Concept
The Knox County School Board’s annual retreat this week was a qualified success. It brought the board members together for a team-building experience none of them will soon forget. Two of them walked out on the Sunday evening cookout and overnight stay at the Maple Leaf Lodge in Townsend, indicating that the team aspect of the get-together was a waste of time and money and that they should have been discussing issues instead of getting to know each other better.
So much for the team approach. The rest of the board can be thankful the disgruntled individualists—Robert Bratton of South Knox County and Chuck James from West Knox—didn’t constitute anything near a majority.
Dan Murphy, the board’s new chairman, set up the retreat to be just that—a retreat. The board hired facilitators from Leadership Knoxville to help develop the team concept.
If the idea had been to hold workshop sessions on the issues, he’d have done it that way, but the board already holds workshop sessions regularly, usually before each monthly meeting. Maybe it’s time to hold a workshop on working together. That’s become an issue in its own right, thanks to Bratton and James.
VARDATE
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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