Fayetteville needs more knowledgeable leaders

There were some missing pieces in reporter Stacy Ryburn’s recent recycling article, which said, “Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville contract their services with companies using trucks with mechanical arms to pick up bins containing recyclable material mixed together. The contractors have access to third-party facilities where the items are sorted.”

This is single stream folks, the method used by Fort Smith when they got caught landfilling their filthy, mixed, single-stream recycling.

A clean, fenced drop off supervised by an attendant who continually interacts with the public will result in clean loads. Such drop-off facilities are far less expensive to operate than curbside programs, and as the story reported, citizens will use them.

Why doesn’t the city staff know how many people are using the drop offs? They could have placed counters at the 15th Street and Marion Orion centers and collected that data. They should have been collecting these data regularly, well before the pandemic ever started. City Council should have been getting quarterly reports on participation rates, costs and contamination associated with both supervised and unsupervised drop offs.

Hopefully January 2021 will bring new members to the Fayetteville City Council, ones who have time to get educated enough on issues that they can ask questions and not simply rubber stamp staff recommendations. Hopefully we’ll have a council that doesn’t accept the results of biased surveys complied by city staff, but rather requires statistically accurate data before voting on expenditures, like consultants and pilot projects.

The pandemic has alerted citizens to the need for closer scrutiny of city expenditures. We need council members with enough business savvy to understand how our tax dollars are being spent. And we need more transparency.

Filing time to run for Fayetteville City Council is July 29-Aug. 5.

LOUISE G. MANN Fayetteville