Editor:
Editor’s note: This letter was sent to the Riverside County Department of Environmental Health.
Re: the letter from you proposing a rate increase for solid waste processing, franchise area 8.
With all due respect, your letter does not make a case for the increase you are proposing and I, Patti Hudson, protest this increase.
Here are my reasons:
1. You say that our rate is much lower than Banning, Anza and Palm Springs, and then admit that those areas have curbside service! How can you compare the rates when a multitude of large, extremely expensive trucks and many extra workers must be utilized to gather those customers’ trash.
Plus, you give the absurd notion that we’re getting a bargain because we can, conveniently to you, deliver our own trash up to the transfer station five days a week.
That is plain stupid. No one takes their trash to the transfer station every day! Are you saying that in the communities that get curbside service CR&R only works one day a week? I don’t think so.
Plus, our community generates much less trash than those curbside areas since most of the properties here are vacation homes that create very little or no trash.
2. You say in the letter that “traditionally, these rates increase approximately 2 percent year.” I did the calculations from 2010 to 2022. Starting from $116.88 and increasing each year, 2 percent would come to $154.13 not $216.
3. You say that our rate is “not currently sufficient to cover the costs of operating the three transfer stations in your area” and yet you give no evidence to support this. What are the costs to operate these stations and how much do you get from the property owners?
It appears to me that our increase is in some way subsidizing those communities who get curbside service since it is apparently CR&R’s desire for us to pay a rate somewhat comparable to theirs. Our rate should be much, much lower than theirs, since we bring our trash to them and average out much less trash per home.
Patti Hudson
Pine Cove
CR&R is absolutely disgraceful. I should know I worked there. They don’t properly dispose of hazardous material because they get charged a fee every time it needs to be collected. So they don’t do it. Of course the more money they save the more money to pad their bonuses. All while they pollute the environment.