School Recycling Bill Will Be Costly
BY BUDDY NEVINS
The Tallahassee road to good intentions is paved with dollar bills.
Take the new proposal that would require every school district in the state to adopt rules for recycling paper.
SB 622 filed by state Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth, is a New Age motherhood and apple pie bill.
What are the real results of such a new requirement?
The bill would have school districts develop rules for recycling paper. The rules would then be adopted by each School Board.
The paper covered by the bill is “newspaper, high-grade office paper, fine paper, bond paper, offset paper, xerographic paper, mimeo paper, and duplicator paper…including a paper napkin, paper towel, or cardboard,” according to a legislative staff analysis.
Let me guess: Broward’s school bureaucrats will announce they are actually saving money. They will claim a big bonus in lower garbage fees and the potential revenue of selling the recycled paper
Don’t believe them!
Can you imagine the number of employees and employee time that it would take the school system to create a recycling plan under the new bill? The school system has hundreds of locations.
We are talking ironically about reams of paper written to meet the requirements of the new bill. Then a fancy PowerPoint presentation for the Superintendent and the School Board.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of hours, of staff time.
And, of course, The School Board can’t do anything without first appointing a chief and then an assistant. Then an assistant’s assistant.
This is a feel good bill. But it will leave taxpayers feeling bad.
March 10th, 2014 at 10:43 am
Mimeo paper? Why not also include telegram paper, manual typewriters, and passenger pigeon cages?
FROM BUDDY:
It has always been said that Tallahassee is decades behind the rest of Florida.
March 10th, 2014 at 2:57 pm
Rule Number 1: Throw recyclable paper in the appropriate trash can.
Rule Number 2: Deposit recyclable paper from appropriate trash can into appropriate large bin on campus.
Repeat as needed.
Do we really need more rules or out of touch legislators?
March 11th, 2014 at 7:31 am
More unnecessary mandates from Tallahassee takes needed money away from the children
March 12th, 2014 at 12:01 am
Recently, there was an article in the Miami Herald that stated how much revenue recycling brought back to the municipalities in Broward Country that were participating in the program. I am talking millions of dollars. Unfortunately, the revenue was being paid to the municipalities and not being passed on to the user, business or homeowner.
If children participate in recycling at home, how difficult can it be to put up the same type of trash cans that state recycling at school and how much longer will it take to take those trash cans to the recycle dumpster because they have to be removed anyway?
March 16th, 2014 at 1:43 pm
ABecky Blackwood
and sadly with the new contracts many municipalities INCREASED the surcharges/franchise fees on monthly bills
FLL raised it from 17% to 23% on February 1
Consumers do not get any break and yet they want us to recycle
March 20th, 2014 at 10:28 pm
Contact your commissioner. I plan on working to elect a mayor who thinks about the property owners and not continuing to increase our taxes because cost reducing measures are not even considered in our city.