Thursday - August 11, 2011

register your septic tank and recycle stuff. yawn.

Sometime last month I was reading our local and really not professional paper.
The poor souls have no idea how really amateur they appear, and so shamelessly continue to publish their little weekly reader. Having said that however, I should point out that at least they have a generally better layout and are larger in paper size, then say the L.A. Times.  Which I saw last year and was underwhelmed by their weekend edition.  Brit papers generally are better. imho.  Well anyway .........

There was a paragraph in our local that said ppl had till the end of the year to register septic tanks and cess pits. Failure to respond and register could result in a $20,000 fine. Huh? When? What?  The septic tank in our ground has been there since the beginning of time. Real estate records would show it. Everything is written down somewhere but okay. The huge problem was .... not one single family ever got any sort of notice or request by their city councils that they had to do this totally new and unheard thing.  If I hadn’t seen it and then almost by accident, and then told a friend and neighbor who didn’t even get the local paper, what then?

The issue over the manner in which this was done even made the national papers, eventually, because the only word ppl got of this, were small articles in local papers.
As the old TV advert says, But wait ... there’s more.

You had to send or call for the paperwork that needed to be filled in. Did it.

But ... wait. There’s more.  In the paper they sent that my wife duly filled out, they mentioned a map of location of the tank.  Location? Map? Huh?  What map?

Well, they wanted us to show on a map where our septic rank was located. Where do we find a map of that? Are we expected to draw one?  No?  OK, then where do we get such a map, wife asked.  Oh, why from this office she’s told. DUH. Then why was it not enclosed with the paper they sent?  So they sent another envelope containing a small map of our back yard, and she dutifully circled the area. Registration application and map were then mailed back to the power that is.
Simple huh?  Or maybe simple minded. Take ur pik.

Something you should know before I begin this story of what we have here. Or maybe that should be what we put up with.  Our city council tax comes to, in American dollars so you can appreciate it better, $2,905.00 and some change, per year, at the current rate of exchange.  Since we are rural, we have no sidewalk, no street lights, no city sewer. So you’d think that at least the trash pick up would be taken care of.

Well, it mostly is but.  For garden waste there is this bag which five years ago replaced the larger wheelie bin for that purpose.

Not too convenient for a large back garden, in a rural environment where we always have more. So, for $40.00 we paid for a second bag that we were given five yrs ago. And ... recycles and kitchen wastes are picked up every two weeks. One week it’s kitchen garbage and the next it’s recycle stuff.  Only two of us now and it worked okay. Now then, on the recycle bins, we have always had two. Ever since we’ve been here. One is the larger green bin the council gave us, and the other is a very old and smaller grey bin, but it says recycle on it.

Well, this week for some reason they didn’t pick up the little grey one. So I called and got someone at the council who said she’d look into it and call me back.

She never did and so I called the trash pick up folks direct to find out what happened and was informed that since there were only two of us living at this address, the city council decreed we could have only one bin emptied. Thing is, after two weeks they are both full. And don’t forget, we get two papers 6 days a week and three papers on Sat. The Telegraph and Mail on weekends are HUGE. Plus all the magazines that come with em, the CD give aways and one week a small paperback book. Then there is all the junk and flyers that we don’t read and bin. We’re talking just newspapers so you can imagine what we have after two weeks with all the other stuff that a household uses.  We don’t even know when this rule went into effect or how the trash pick up ppl would have known.  Oh ... I forgot to mention it. 

The rule in place states that only households with six and more may have two wheelie bins.  Like those you see here.

If the pick ups were weekly as they used to be, we’d be okay with one bin. Not anymore. So the trash guy said I needed to call someone at the city council which I did. One of the things he suggested was that we take the excess to the dump somewhere. Right. We pay 2,900 and do their job by taking our own trash to the dump. I don’t drive anyway and neither of us is up to hauling anything that weighs much.  So he suggested another way to go and I hope you’re sitting down.

He told me that if we put the overflow in plastic bags (whose use the city is supposed to be discouraging) like our market shopping bags, like this one ..

We could lay em on the ground next to the green wheelie bin and they would pick those up. I asked him if he had any idea how many of those little bags, they measure 12” across and 12” deep, did he have a clue how many of those we’d use just for the newspapers.

He agreed the rule wasn’t logical, especially as there was also a rule that you could not put plastic bags in the bins meant for recycling AND, recycled trash should be loose, not put in plastic bags. They are very clear on that. But here is someone telling me to put things in plastic bags. So then any overflow we had due to the green bin not holding everything, could be placed in bags and on the ground. Where the guy who follows the truck would then have to lift several bags and toss em into the back of the truck instead of the automatic arms picking up a second bin.  So in the end, it would all go into the same waste disposal truck anyway.  btw ... these bags are degradable but that’s aside. Or I suppose we could use larger white trash bags. The other kind that aren’t so degradable. But what the heck is the difference ?

He said he’d talk to the other folks in charge and we now have an exemption.

But I ended up speaking to four ppl before it was all resolved.

No wonder this country is SNAFU.

Posted by peiper     on 08/11/2011 at 06:03 AM   
Filed Under: • Personal •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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