RALEIGH – Local control. That’s what advocates of new local taxing authority for say they were fighting for. They got it, in North Carolina’s new 2007-09 state budget. But many of these same folks, in and out of public office, are fighting against local control when it comes to another issue important to some North Carolina localities: landfill capacity.
The legislative machinations over the past few days have been hard to follow, but it boils down to this. Last year, faced with a rising demand for landfill space and a positive reception to waste-management firms in many local communities, the General Assembly instigated a yearlong moratorium. Apparently, the idea was to use the time to come up with new taxes and regulations that would, in effect, block the development of new landfills. But time is running out. At least one compromise bill gained momentum recently, only to be sidelined when Sen. R.C. Soles proposed a crafty amendment that few understood, a provision that allowed neighbors to change the designation of their land so as to block the development of a properly sited landfill.
There are many moving parts in the landfill-moratorium issue, so allow me to take a shot at clarifying the matter at least a bit.
First of all, the sources of opposition to new landfills are varied. Some activists just don’t want to add capacity at all, preferring that North Carolinians and Americans recycle more, consume less, and weave our own clothes out of discarded strands of the activists’ righteous indignation. As wrenching changes in daily life are unlikely and uneconomical, and sackcloth is itchy and rides up in the wrong places, these objectives aren’t going to be met, but what do these activists care?
Other opponents of a new wave of landfill development in North Carolina are genuinely concerned about the adequacy of current watershed-protection regulations or fear that the state will gain a reputation as a dumping ground for other people’s rubbish, which I must say would be an improvement over North Carolina’s current reputation as a source of rubbish, in the political sense, dumped on other states’ penitentiaries.
In reality, the state already imposes substantial, one might even say onerous, regulation on the siting of facilities such as solid-waste landfills. If your image of a landfill is a bit hole in the ground into which mobbed-up “sanitation workers” in leisure suits and pinky rings pour stinking vats of toxic waste, you are decades out of date and overly reliant on Simpsons episodes for your environmental information (the Simpsons is actually an excellent source of insight on many matters, but the environment is not one of them). Modern landfills are carefully engineered, safe, and threaten neither public health nor local economies.
Furthermore, it’s not at all clear why North Carolina policymakers should be up in arms about the existence of a market for solid-waste disposal that crosses state lines. For one thing, it exists and will always exist as long as we live in a free society governed by free trade among the states. For another, North Carolinians are reliant on the existence of special facilities in other states to handle certain hazardous wastes, and may soon (if we’re fortunate) be reliant on an out-of-state depository for nuclear waste, so it’s not as though we have a true interest in waste-disposal protectionism.
What’s most galling about late-breaking attempts to quash any reasonable compromise and allow new capacity is that it is predicated precisely on the premise that many state lawmakers have of late been decrying: that the legislature in Raleigh knows better than the people back home. If local communities would welcome a new investment in solid-waste management, because of its fiscal and economic benefits, but are prevented from doing so by uninformed scare-mongering in the halls of the General Assembly, who gains?
It certainly isn’t the taxpayers, who must shoulder higher costs for waste disposal and financing local public services. It isn’t the environment, which was never imperiled in the first place. It isn’t local elected officials, whose authority would be stripped again by the General Assembly. So, by process of elimination . . .
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.