Dumpster Siting Saga Exemplifies Good-Faith Governance

After a week of reading through files, talking with Bonner County staff and visiting the various sites involved, I am stunned by how painful and convoluted the process of siting a new Dumpster location in the Hope area has become.

The new site is less than an acre in size. A new, clean facility would substitute for a messy, somewhat dangerous, unmanned station. Despite county Planning and Zoning’s official finding to the contrary, it clearly is essential.

It’s amazing it has occupied so much time and energy, and has a year or more to go until any resolution will be reached. Having cost the county $57,000 for the land and, after four years of twisting in the winds of fate and public sentiment, an estimated $30,000 in staff time expenses, normally, I would be outraged. But, to my surprise, I can’t see that the county is at fault!

I know the history on this one and I can hear the voices all the way from Clark Fork immediately crying: “The county blew it every which way but loose!” Yet having served in government, I feel there is a gulf of distance between making a mistake - which we all do - and blowing it, which implies a major public cost for a decision, which clearly has not happened in this situation.

The mistakes are easy:

In the summer of 1996 when the need to create staffed Dumpster sites started this process, the county forgot to adhere to the National Preservation Act, requiring an archaeological study. But the following fall it did one. Its conclusion was that there was no discernible cultural impact.

The county also submitted a site plan for the facility that impacted designated wetlands. So with the advice of the Army Corps of Engineers, they redesigned the site.

But by the time those fixes had occurred, the infamous election of the Bud and Larry Show had just taken place, and the world was on hold for awhile. When a bit of normalcy returned, the new board felt there had been enough public concern about the county’s chosen site to set up a public committee to look into other alternatives.

A new committee was established. It researched other possible locations, finding four likely candidates, the most promising of which was land owned by Compton White. He was willing to sell. But before the land deal could be arranged he died and the deal fell through. The committee turned to other identified options but each site had developed its own not-in-my-back-yard defense forces.

So much time had passed that, by then, there had been more elections in the county. Because of the site plan changes to fix the wetlands problem, the new commissioners decided to go through the entire public process again and get a new conditional use permit for the original site and land they had bought in 1996.

So, in June of this year, the Planning Commission heard that request with four years’ worth of documentation and studies to defend it. That pile even included a letter from the neighboring school district saying if the site was properly maintained it would have no objections.

Still, 20 individuals and groups testified against the proposal and the commission unanimously denied the request: a reversal from the 1996 decision.

Instead of overturning the denial - an option which many governments might have used at this point - the county commissioners formed a second public committee and asked it to bring a completely new proposal forward. The new committee is hard at work on a new round of public alternatives the county hopes to entertain next spring.

Since governments are made of humans they always will make mistakes in process and that’s OK. It’s when they step to the letter of the law and refuse to listen to public cries to go further, to allow more input, more notification, more time, that they need to be criticized quickly and strongly.

The county has shown itself time and time again willing to meet the public where it wants the government to be, rather than the other way around.

And the bottom line is, if you don’t like Dumpster sites, the Planning Commission is a bad place to fight them. They need to be fought in the trenches where we buy all the junk that we in time throw away. Such a battle could lead to a county program that might issue credits against individual garbage bills - levied on your taxes - for every pound of recyclables you weigh in at a Dumpster site. Something that would benefit everyone and truly reduce the biggest waste of all: land-filling our resources.