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FALCON HEIGHTS CITY COUNCIL MINUTES March 24, 2004 '7' Refuse Collection -Public Hearin on Resolution of Intent (continued) The Public Hearing was opened to the audience for commentary. Jeff Alexander, 1700 North Albert, said that he is the Chair of the Solid Waste Commission. He said that he would like to speak about an issue that has been at the forefront lately. There has been a lot of printed material and talk about it. That issue is choice. He would like to put choice in perspective. The other day he was looking at the City web site. One of the pages on the web site is called streets and utilities. When you click on streets you get things like seal coating. It says there is seal coating every couple of years and talks about curbing being put in. Actually, when you look at it and when you cross Hoyt into Saint Paul, we have some pretty fine streets. We are proud of our streets. Our streets are done by the City. You go down the list and you see snow removal. The City does it. Electricity and gas is provided by Xcel Energy. Water and sewage are provided by the St. Paul Water Utility. He put a map of the City on the overhead projector and explained that the black dots on the map highlight private wells that are/were in the City. Most of them are capped now, but there was a time when all of those places had active wells. Some are still active. At that time the choice for water was only one choice-a well. And, if you wanted to have a flushing toilet, you had one choice and that was a septic tank with a drain field. Eventually, as you can see from here, somebody's drain field became somebody's well. He suspects it was a night just like tonight when the City Council was deciding what are we going to do about all these wells and drain fields. That night a decision to go with City water and City sewage was made and now we have St. Paul water and metro wide sewage which, to the best of our technological ability, is recycled safely back into the environment and is no longer sitting in the back yards like it used to. If you continue on the City web site you will see a link called garbage. It is a service. When you click on it you will show recycling. Recycling is done by the City every first and third Friday. The trash haulers are the responsibility of the residents. It is the only thing in the whole list that is the responsibility of the residents. It is our responsibility to organize our haulers and choose which haulers we want. He uses Walters and is very happy with Walters. Walters has been very good to his family for over ten years. If you look at your bill, in very small print, there is a statement that says you may be responsible for any liability that results from well contamination at a facility where your waste is deposited. What does this mean? What this means is Walters, like everyone else, is a courier. The garbage is taken from his place to point x. Point x could be a landfill, a perfectly preserved pouch in Iowa, oftentimes buried in some farmer's field. This whole 180 days of public forum is about choice. He believes the discussion is about the public good, just as our predecessors had this discussion fifty years ago about drain fields. They had a discussion trying to figure out a better way and that is what tonight is about. It's about the future and what we, as a community are going to do about our garbage. Douglas Carnival, attorney for the National Solid Wastes Management Association, Minnesota Chapter, said that he was in attendance to urge the Council to not proceed further with organized collection or the study of organized collection.