The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Veteran city councillor Cal Huntley invoked the Almighty last week when voicing his contempt for the provincial government's latest expensive edict. "We now have to pay for our garbage to go into our own dump..." he said during a conversation on taxes and spending. "I mean, my God, if they want a recycling program in Manitoba, it should be provincially funded and subsidized through general taxation and not be thrown on the backs of the city or the communities involved." Huntley's frustration is understandable. It's nonsense that Flin Flon taxpayers have to, by next year, install a giant scale at their own landfill and then pay bossy bureaucrats in Winnipeg every time they toss out a tonne of grass clippings or holiday fruitcakes. At least the all-knowing bureaucrats promise to give us taxpayers back some of our money, but precisely how much hinges entirely on the success or non-success of the Flin Flon Recycling Centre, a non-city entity. It is quite overt what the province is trying to do. It wants to force municipalities into mandating recycling while keeping its own nose clean. "Don't like paying $4 for every bag of garbage you throw away? Don't blame us, blame your malevolent city council!" Huntley went on to make an obvious point: these sorts of shenanigans cannot go on forever. At some point, Premier Moses and his government disciples will have to stop bringing costly commandments down from their legislative Mt. Sinai. If they don't, towns and cities will either crumble or go broke. The garbage scale and fee is but one example of government demands making life needlessly difficult for City Hall. I am the first to point out council's misplaced priorities, but in all fairness, government decrees are placing them in a financial straight jacket from which they can ill afford many worthwhile investments. Many residents have wondered whether council was smoking the last of Trout Lake's non-mineral output when they agreed to spend $1 million on the new Wallace Ave. bridge. Did we really need this Cadillac of a bridge when all that was there before was a culvert with some dirt and pavement over it? The answer is, probably not, but council has blamed Ð ready for it Ð government regulation for inflating the cost of the project far beyond what we commoners would consider reasonable. Such episodes raise an interesting question, one that I'm sure has crossed the minds of our councillors in their deepest moments of annoyance: What if we just said no? What if city council flat-out told the government they could not afford, and therefore would not comply with, their cockamamie schemes and cookie-cutter regulations? How would the upper levels of government respond to this form of civil disobedience? Would they really expect the populace of Flin Flon, whose infrastructure is crumbling and whose taxes and utility bills are skyrocketing, to place great importance on trash scales and seven-figure bridges? Undoubtedly, council would have the people of Flin Flon onside. Which would force the government to add fines to our rising bills, backtrack or hand over the cash for these supposedly crucial endeavours. The least likely response would appear to be fines, especially considering both the provincial and federal governments stand on shaky political ground. Just some food for thought for our present and future councillors should forced, needless expenditures continue to spiral out of control. Local Angle runs Fridays.
