Charlie Landi. (Photo: Dan Barton)
Landi, a veritable terrier on your ankle, has even identified (twice) a dozen or so large tracts of vacant land around the county with sufficient space to serve as a landfill. How did Landi come up with these sites? He asked the county’s Real Property Tax Service Agency for a list of parcels with 200 acres or more.
Unfortunately, Landi did not contact the owners of those properties — most in the southern end of the county — before listing same in the newspapers. Rochester Town Supervisor Carl Chipman almost got unelected a few years ago when Landi first ran this one up the pole by advising he’d consider thinking about a landfill in his hometown. One can only imagine the shock and dismay of owners of (in most cases) pristine acreage when they read that with their cornflakes. “My mother is buried on that property!” cried one owner.
No problem for Landi. RRA has rights of eminent domain, meaning even loved ones are not safe on their own property …
How much a county landfill might cost hasn’t been determined, but skeptical RRA officials, most of whom consider Landi’s proposal at best premature, say $50 million would be a good starting point.
Some years ago my colleague Brian Hollander, then a member of the RRA board, advanced the idea of resurrecting RRA-capped town landfills, cleaning up pollution barely covered in loam, and engineering the sites for county purposes for four or five years. Once depleted, a landfill could be properly capped and the county could move on to the next site. Hollander’s epiphany had the happy consequence of putting every town under the gun.
RRA had and has a different strategy. Undoubtedly, the RRA, with flow control in its arsenal (county law requires all garbage to be routed through the agency), has flaws, but in terms of its ultimate mission — getting that crap off my curb! — is not broken.
Most people, I suspect, would rather see a more vigorously enforced recycling program before we go digging up somebody’s backyard. As long as diesel fuel doesn’t go to 10 bucks a gallon, Landi’s Landfill is likely to remain only a mirage in its lone advocate’s mind.
Notes
Legislator Rich Parete, chairman of Laws & Rules, says the legislature should have voted on the pay raise before the election. I don’t recall Parete, locked in a tough reelection battle, making noise about that during the campaign.
Parete’s father, legislature chairman John, expressed dismay that while the legislature was finally focusing its attention on a pay raise for itself, he couldn’t get anybody to sign on to a minimum salary of $15 for county workers.
Sheriff Paul VanBlarcum says he’s OK with the $101,706 he makes, but he doesn’t like the idea of high-ranking underlings making more, with overtime. “My people work a lot harder than I do,” the sheriff said, “but I get to come and go as I please.” Big deal. “This year I might get five days’ vacation,” he said.
In Orange County a candidate to fill a vacancy on the county legislature says he’ll donate his $30,000 salary to charity. Hmm. Rank-and-file Orange County legislators make 30 large and they have a county executive? Maybe our people are underpaid after all.
Legislator’s pay has long been too low. How might anyone expect these folks to have much of an incentive to do any kind of job–much less a good one–without better pay, in a county where there is precious little other opportunity to earn much?
Discussing what the county executive might do in relation to these moves is a lot like discussing how a $130K per annum salaried underqualified lifelong politicsl animal(who also has never earned his salary and has performed with way too many deficiencies) who wheedled his way into the job from within the ranks of the county employees should be ethically allowed to pass judgment on legislators raising their salaries in some fashion according to some level of propriety.
20K per annum without health insurance for county legislators cannot reasonably be cause for anyone to march on anything(taking some of it out of the salary of the county executive would prove even more equitable). The core issue remains how the county is run, over which there is room for lots and lots and lots of disagreement.
These guys were making less than $500 a month. At a living wage, that means you can only expect them to spend 4 hours a week working on research or writing laws. Hopefully this will mean they will be more invested in understanding the issues before them, and researching creative ideas on how to address those problems.
Love your writing, Hugh. Excellent tone. Thoughtfully executed without the mind-numbing, dialed-in bias of the “other” newspaper.