EDITORIAL: Showing government inaction at its best

August 26, 2008

The compost wars continue, and at the rate we're going the 2024 presidential election will arrive before they end.

Down in the valley of the Intervale in Burlington there sits piles of fragrant compost, where Intervale Compost has been turning food scraps into "natural" fertilizer for the garden since 1987. Here the city of Burlington and its environs practice Big Green the way it is preached in Vermont, as a cultural, social and lifestyle religion.

This is truly the way a society should dispose of its waste, in a way that it is returned for a better use. You could probably find no example anywhere in which a few do-gooders had created an incredible way to deal with the awful amount of waste humans leave behind.

Peculiarly, there is often little smell that emanates from these piles of waste turned to dirt. Anytime you ride by on a mountain bike or take a hike with the dogs, you have to be amazed that such a large operation, in essence a "dump" of a higher caliber if you want to be precise about this mass process, exists with so little odor.

Scraps of food from large-scale producers such as Fletcher Allen Hospital and small-scale producers such as restaurants end up here -- as much as 20,000 tons a year -- rather than being shoveled into the earth at far-flung landfills. Composting saves money, composting protects the environment, composting is the wave of the future as is everything else we must to do stop drowning ourselves in the refuse of excess that has become such a part of modernity.

Unless ...

The mounds, you see, sit along the flood plain of the Winooski River, and therein lies the conflict that bedevils the "environmentalists" and provides a sterling example of can't-do governance.

Our caring and responsible federal government, though incapable of regulating much, it seems, feels it must manage one itty-bitty composting operation on the edge of one of the greenest little towns you'll find in America.

Given a good flogging from a flood, which is due at least every 100 or 500 years, all this composting waste could be washed down river, similar to flushing waste directly into Lake Champlain. To be sure this would not be a pleasant sight if it happened. Anyone can understand the concerns of the regulators.

At one end of the conflict is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which has made it clear that this is no place for a landfill, regardless of the benefit to society. That fact should never be excluded from arguments over the righteousness of enforcing the law. But FEMA is not the kind of agency that offers good solutions anytime you ask its opinion or assistance.

In the middle is the state. Like the feds, the state is hardly known for its expert regulation of anything, though we certainly hire enough people to do regulating.

On the other end is the Chittenden County Solid Waste District. It struggles to find an answer to a challenge dropped into its lap -- taking over the Intervale operation and trying to find an alternative -- where its expertise should be hailed as qualified.

There have been some possible solutions raised, but the squabbling and the level of inaction and the finger-pointing has become so severe that we all know where this is headed. We've been here many times in Vermont. We live in a state of inaction. The conflict has risen to such a notorious level that this challenge is destined to be left on the table to rot while the food scraps gather for quite a time to come.

Sometimes this inability, this incapacity, this stubbornness, this absence of a helping hand and this unwillingness of our public leaders to work together for the benefit of society that they are entrusted to protect is amazing.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080826/OPINION/808260308/1006