Editorial: Revisit recycling rules

Things couldn’t have been much worse at the town Recycling Center this weekend. A cross-section of Islanders — from artists to tradesmen — waited patiently through Friday’s Town Board meeting agenda to make strong statements about the picking ban imposed since March 1. They had a lot to say, and some constructive suggestions for re-opening access in ways that could mitigate part of the town’s liability.

On Saturday someone stole two of the “No Scavenging” signs from the dump. While we may assume that this incident is connected to the ban, we believe that Sunday’s unfortunate fire in the construction debris pile was just that, unfortunate, and a reminder of the inherent dangers associated with the town transfer station.

It’s those dangers that are really at issue here. A dump is an inherently hazardous place. Bins of broken glass, construction debris heaped so high as to defy gravity, a precarious pile of twisted metal — there’s no question about it, this is a risky business.

But as mentioned Friday, the dump is dangerous whether you are picking things up or putting them down. Safety can be improved in any operation and this is certainly true of the Recycling Center. If town officials are really concerned about liability at the dump, they need to look at the big picture. The focus should not be solely on the goods going out, but also on the goods coming in, how they are received, stored and sorted and how often they are carted off and cleaned up.

No one’s buying the economic argument anymore. If the town really wanted more revenues from the Recycling Center, they would sort the materials coming in. Instead, as one speaker noted on Friday, a 5-cent can becomes a 1-cent can, and copper that a picker could have salvaged is degraded in value as a “mixed metal.”

Sorting incoming goods might take more manpower, or so some would argue. But with a fiscal audit showing little accountability for man hours in the combined Highway and Public Works Department, that argument is hard to swallow.

“We elect you people to try and resolve problems, and I’m sure there are ways you could have worked it out,” Jerry Glassberg told the Town Board on Friday. While the rules were Mark Ketcham’s to implement, we agree that the Town Board needs to take charge. This is not simply an in-house policy. It impacts public use of a town resource and needs a full hearing before being implemented and enforced.

The ban on picking has distracted us from the many other deficiencies found during recent internal investigations of the Highway/Public Works operation. Most of those were related to record-keeping, oversight and accountability. Keeping residents out of the recycling piles does not make those problems go away.