PANEL HAS FIRST TALKS ON TRASH

The city's newest citizens advisory board the Solid Waste Task Force Thursday met to discuss the parameters the group will follow in examining volume-based trash billing and other solid-waste issues.

The nine-member committee is expected to recommend to the Cape Girardeau City Council within 90 days various billing options, and will further study the city's role in the formation of a solid-waste district in Southeast Missouri.

Other responsibilities will include a look at Missouri's solid-waste law often referred to as Senate Bill 530 and how it relates to Cape Girardeau's solid-waste plan, and recommendations regarding building and equipment needs for the city's recycling, trash and compost programs.

City officials spent most of the meeting Thursday explaining the city's current solid-waste and recycling program.

City Manager J. Ronald Fischer said the programs were adopted after Doug Leslie, public works director, and Doug Kaminskey, environmental services coordinator, studied extensively other programs throughout the country.

"Neither one of them has tried to reinvent the wheel," Fischer said.

The city manager said that the task force is similar to one formed about three years ago that eventually recommended the city embark on a pilot recycling program in the Woodland Hills subdivision.

Shortly after the pilot program began, new state regulations, in the form of SB-530, required the types of measures implemented in Woodland Hills, Fischer said. Subsequently, a citywide recycling program was introduced last year.

This year Cape Girardeau County Presiding Commissioner Gene Huckstep spearheaded an effort to establish a multiple-county solid-waste district, which the new state solid-waste law sets out.

The law requires counties to reduce by 40 percent the amount of waste going into Missouri landfills by 1998. Fischer said formation of a solid-waste plan for the regional district is a key part of SB-530.

Fischer said he thinks Cape Girardeau's early response to SB-530 ultimately will benefit the city.

He said area counties included in the regional solid-waste district also have studied the issue. Perry and Ste. Genevieve counties, for example, studied the feasibility of trash incineration.

But, as Cape Girardeau learned while researching the issue, incineration likely would cost nearly four times what the city now pays.

Leslie reviewed SB-530 for the task force, and Kaminskey provided information primarily on the city's recycling program.

City officials have been under fire since the program was adopted last year. The most common complaints from residents focus on reduction in trash collection from twice to once weekly in lieu of a weekly recycling collection and a recent $1.64 trash-fee hike.

Fischer said the city has tried to make the transition as painless as possible, but it hasn't been easy.

"We're trying to work through this thing with the people, knowing they don't want things thrust upon them," he said. "But Senate Bill 530 is not something we asked for; it was thrust on us."

Task force member Loretta Schneider, who previously served on the city council, said most of the critics are unaware that when trash services were free prior to the mid-1980s, the city received federal revenue sharing dollars that went toward solid waste.

"About 10 years ago that money was phased out completely," she said.

Task force member Robert Herbst, also a former city council member, said taxpayers in Cape Girardeau pay relatively low property tax rates, which means services have to be funded primarily with fees.

Leslie said that Jackson, for example, is "very strongly financed by property taxes. People there think they're getting trash for free, but it's being financed from property taxes."

Kaminskey said that although participation rates in the recycling program generally top 30 percent citywide, the amount of household waste going to the landfill has only been reduced about 12-14 percent.

He said the 40 percent reduction mandated in SB-530 will be a "tough goal to reach, and it's not going to happen overnight."

Members of the committee include Schneider, Herbst, Kathleen Ruopp, Chairman Calvin Chapman, Sarah Holt, Costella Patterson, Richmond Payne, Vincent Seyer and Jean Simpson.