Gilford: thanks for subsidizing my garbage pickup

To The Daily Sun,

I write to give my earnest thanks and great appreciation to the Gilford Board of Selectmen, the Gilford town administrator, and the other taxpayers in Gilford for subsidizing the garbage pickups from my home.

I pay Waste Management on a quarterly basis to pick up my solid waste (i.e. garbage) from my home every week. They do a pretty good job at it, and it saves me from having to trek my garbage to a transfer or waste station.

In addition to the recently-reported debacle of the cost overruns for the construction of a new Gilford transfer station (about which I will write more in the future), there was a slight mention in one of the articles that the commercial haulers, like Waste Management, are charged $45 per ton for what they dump at the town transfer or waste station (including what they have picked up from my home), but the town itself pays $90 per ton for that same trash that is dumped from Gilford residents. So, the effect is that the other taxpayers in Gilford are subsidizing my trash pickups, even though I would certainly be willing to pay Waste Management (or whomever) the full, true cost of my trash removal.

When I first heard about this ridiculous arrangement a few years ago, I asked why things were being done this way, but I never got a satisfactory answer, other than this is the way we have always done it.

This brings to mind Einstein’s famous aphorism to the effect that insanity is when you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome.

You could not make up this stuff even if you tried.

Norman J. Silber

Gilford