The Portland dumpsite composting facility in the small town of North Plains, Oregon has been given a two-year reprieve by the august brain-trust at the Washington County Board of Commissioners: the operator, Recology, has been ordered to stop receiving food waste from commercial sources in order to bring the pervasive stink situation out there under control. Henceforth, the company is to accept only yard debris and residential food waste from Portland. The Commissioners figure that the requirement to eighty-six the commercial food waste will reduce the clouds emanating from the operation, but many area residents (and those who pass through while tooling down highway 26) remain unconvinced.
Some residents claim losses in the millions of dollars in terms of property values as a result of the continual stench associated with the operation, although given the small size of the town, the numbers seem inflated. Still, what they've been dealing with since the "pilot project" began has generated an extraordinary number of complaints, and it's safe to say that neither Recology nor its partners at the City of Portland and Metro have been particularly good neighbors.
When Portland began this idiocy, Metro immediately jumped aboard because it's all "green and sustainable" and all that happy horse-hockey. This might have been okay, had they selected then-mayor Sammy Adams' neighborhood for siting the project; instead, they went to the small community of North Plains, which sits just outside Metro's vaunted "Urban Growth Boundary".
Yep - let's just dump Portland/Metro garbage on the outskirts of a tiny town; they won't be able to do anything about it. They can always move if they don't like it. And in so doing, they've come to symbolize much of what's wrong with their "green" creed: authoritarianism.
It's all good, as long as it isn't in their back yard.
