On Tuesday Polk County Commissioners declared the current problem with uncollected household garbage in the western half of the county an emergency.
Commissioners authorized their staff to work out the details to fix the problem with FCC, an Italy-based garbage company that has the current contract for that part of unincorporated Polk County.
What is troubling about the discussion was the suggestion that what needs to occur is to suspend collection of recycling carts or yard waste to allow the company to supposedly catch up with the collections it lately has missed around time it expanded its contractual obligations to include a big chunk of neighboring Hillsborough County.
Commissioners said this problem is widespread, but the only location they cited was Jacksonville, which formerly employed Polk Solid Waste Director Ana Wood.
Jacksonvile did suspend its curbside recycling collection in October and is scheduled to resume collections in April.
However, missing from the discussion is the fact that Jacksonville also has drop-off recycling locations that residents could have used in the meantime to prevent recyclables from ending up in the landfill.
Drop-off recycling locations once existed in Polk, but they have been eliminated.
The last one, which ironically was located near the Polk County Solid Waste & Recycling office at the North Central Landfill, was closed at Wood’s direction because it was just too much trouble to accommodate the public there.
And that is the crux of the problem with Polk’s recycling program in general. It is geared toward the convenience of the bureaucracy, not the convenience of the customers.
The system has been broken for awhile because Wood and her staff have reportedly resisted efforts suggested by other county staffers, such as the Communications Department, to better inform the public about recycling policies and contamination issues.
Solutions were laid out in a consutant report issued three years ago that’s still still collecting dust.
Despite promises that they will eventually get to it, sometime or other, customer frustration and lack of transparency continue and the majority of commissioners seem uninterested in fixing the problem.