Another of Mayor D’s so-called “accomplishments” – The Green Can Compost program, GREAT IDEA, which potentially brought income into the City, but instead cost the taxpayers. Once nominally in place, the program was essentially abandoned, running on auto-pilot with existing participants.

What was ignored, unmanaged, undone??

• Promotion of and communication about the program (What was it? Half the city had no idea!!)
• Additional applicants-The web page said people could participate, but no, you couldn’t.
• Contamination issues – Plastic dog poop bags, cans, and bottles do not go into compost, and pedestrians kept dropping these and other items into the green cans sitting at the curb awaiting pickup.
• Pickup schedules and non-pickup by Public Works – Was your restaurant pickup 3 days a week? 2 days? What if the truck never comes?
• …and of course there were issues with the maintenance of the vehicle(s) used for pick-up.

—these issues were all un-budgeted and left to simmer and be solved “down the road” by the next administration. From the New Hope Gazette:

In addition to the parking concerns, there was alarming news about the city’s curbside compost program. The city lost its contract with the current compost collection company. Business administrator Alex Torpey secured a short term deal with Waste Management, so the collection on Mondays will remain uninterrupted.

Fahl asked Torpey to detail why the contract was terminated and Torpey said, “In our compost stream, there was a lot of material that can’t be in the compost, some actually that can’t be in the regular trash which included things like bleach containers, broken glass, a coffee pot, metal forks, a bag of ice melt … which ended up seeping into the entire load and contaminating everything.” The city has since posted photos to their Facebook page.

Torpey mentioned this, along with the market for regular recycling, as a “wake up call,” and indicated the city is in conversation with other municipalities and farms and hoped that a permanent solution could be “really local,” mentioning that Princeton borough’s composting initiative had trucks hauling compost all the way to Delaware.

— Read on www.newhopefreepress.com/2019/06/21/parking-concerns-dominate-lambertville-june-governing-body-meeting/

Think long and hard before you put another fox back into the henhouse. A mayor of 27 years doesn’t need another chance to show us what he can do. We have some notion of what he can do. If you don’t, read about it. The truth is out there.

—Christo