RiversdaleReporter.ca

Welcome, friends, explorers, and weary internet travelers! This is the unofficial local newspaper for Riversdale an upcoming area of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

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Saskatoon's Hillary Clintonesque Mayor Charlie Clark and the silly councillors who invariably vote with him have voted to replace Saskatoon's present paid-out-of-property-taxes-one-size-for-every-family garbage bins with a three size bin system. In addition to paying their property taxes, scheduled to rise again as they have every year under Clark's stewardship, home owners will "get to choose" which size of garbage bin they will use and pay a monthly garbage bin sized-based fee to the city for the collection of same. Those opting for large bins will pay a higher fee, those opting for small bins a lower fee, and those opting for the middle size bins will pay a fee in between the higher and lower fees.

Why does the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story come to mind?

Clark argued for the change on the grounds that those who generate the most garbage and require the largest bins should pay more and that families that have managed to reduce their generated waste should be able to pay less for trash disposal than those who have not and that this garbage-generator-pay system will result in less total garbage in the landfill because families who have not reduced their generated waste will be encouraged to do so so they can get a smaller garbage bin and thereby reduce their collection costs such that this new system and its varied bin-size based collection charges will so affect family trash generation that it will delay the need for a landfill replacement. Additionally, (and completely irrelevantly) other cities have been implementing the three bin system.

The system has as its core garbage volume generation penalization and public shaming. Supposedly Saskatoon citizens will look around and see who in their community has done the environmentally correct thing and reduced their garbage generation and has now an intermediate or smaller sized bin and who has not and is still generating such garbage volumes that they require the large bin.

One has to ask: Is garbage volume really what is important when it comes to environmental protection and limiting landfill size growth? Shouldn't the type of garbage generated and its hazardousness to life be what is important when it comes to environmental protection? Isn't the biodegradability of garbage a household is generating as great a determinant on the need for more landfill land as the volume of garbage a household generates? Wood and plant material that isn't diverted to one of the city's not so conveniently located public composting sites -- that no one who doesn't own a truck or car can realistically make use of -- will biodegrade quickly and is much less likely to continue to exist for decades and necessitate landfill expansion than plastics, metals, and glass that aren't biodegradable. Tree branches are much less harmful and environmentally sticky than dirty diapers or unrecycled electronics.

But this is the only realistic way to tackle the landfill problem you say, asserting that we don't have the technology to determine what people are throwing into their trash cans (we certainly do) or that we don't really want our civic government garbage trucks fitted with cameras to digitally capture what each household is disposing weekly or biweekly.

No, we certainly don't want such privacy invasive actions as they are as bad as or worse than the harm they are intended to prevent. But doing so would have a chance of meeting Charlie's landfill expansion reduction objective, something the Goldilocks garbage scheme has little hope of doing.

The group thinkers at city hall have clearly failed to appreciate that there is no guarantee the shaming will go in the direction they think it will. What this scheme is going to do is leave lower income households without the ability to get trash containers sufficient for their purposes, create whole areas of the city with large garbage bins and neighbourhoods with small garbage bins because middle or larger sized cans aren't affordable for their residents, and neighbourhoods where the more economically sound will have large or middle sized garbage bins and those who lack surplus funds will have to telegraph to everyone else in their neighbourhood that they aren't swimming in cash by opting for and putting out their small garbage bin.

Charlie's boneheaded scheme to bring class warfare to Saskatoon garbage collection may create the equivalent of the National Health Service glasses improper stigma into city trash collection.

Sadly, this isn't the only damage this incredibly stupid move by East Side Charlie and his band of silly Councillors will cause.

The dumping of garbage is already a problem in Riversdale. On multiple occasions I have had to call the city to complain about garbage dumped in the alley behind my garage. This problem would even be worse if the Riversdale BID wouldn't employ people in the warmer months to keep 20th Street and some of its adjacent alleys and intersecting side streets clean.

I have heard from others living in communities near Riversdale that they too have a problem with the dumping of garbage.

From whence does this garbage dumping come? It comes in the main from three sources; the poorest of the poor who dumpster dive the large business bins in the back alleys looking for food to consume and bottles and cans to collect and take to Sarcan to exchange for some money, the poor who are just so angry at their plight that they knock over the garbage bins for spite, and from people who don't live in the community and are too cheap to pay fees to haul their trash to the landfill.

People unable to afford the large garbage bins and unable to reduce their trash out are going to have to keep the extra trash in their homes or garages creating long term hoarding issues or they are going to dump the extra garbage somewhere, most probably for those without trucks or cars the back alleys of their local neighborhoods, and for those with cars or trucks or access to them in other neighbourhoods or the countryside.

So... what might a sensible administration have done to achieve the laudable goal of reducing the amount of waste that goes into the city landfill? Firstly, it could create community based composting in local communities, especially in the core neighborhoods and bring portable wood-chippers into the communities during the warmer months. Second it could ban the retailing of items with inordinate amounts of non-biodegradable packaging and encourage retailers and manufacturers to sell goods and materials in bulk. Thirdly, it could persuade the provincial government to impose recycling fees on a much wider range of of items and promote the increased recycling of a variety of plastics, metals, and even cloth. There are probably a dozen or so more things it could do that I can't think of off the top of my head. But expecting sensible, rational policies from this administration really seems to be expecting way too much.

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Perhaps recognizing the class war character of its new three bin sized collection system, and the difficulties it will cause for lower income households, the city approved a $100 subsidy for eligible low income families to defray costs of the new, not property tax funded, three bin system. It estimates the subsidy will serve roughly 1000 to 1500 eligible households. There are more than 60,000 households in the city so the pittance of a "subsidy" will only help a pittance of those households that the new system will cause harm to. When Charlie and his merry band are finally voted out of office, one can only hope the city bureaucrats who supported and worked for the implementation of the Goldilocks garbage bin scheme are fired summarily for cause.

The Giant Tiger on Avenue F and 22nd Street has closed as has Chung Wah Chinese Grocery, an Asian grocery store that operated in Riversdale for years. Both of the business premises they occupied now sit empty. Eastern Market, another Asian grocery store that has been part of the Riversdale community is also gone. So too An An Market.

The closures will create additional hardship for Riversdale residents, especially those who don't have motor vehicles. Fortunately, there remains one grocery store in diverse and inclusive Riversdale, Glory House Foods, which caters especially to the African community and may also see items of interest to the East and South Asian community and a store which caters to people from the middle east on the corner of 22nd Street and Avenue H. It is a great place to buy Turkish delight and other unfamiliar to most North Americans candy and products.

Fortunately, an online tool exists that can help people avoid burdensome trips to grocery stores by helping them chose to go shopping when the time they spend waiting in check out lines is likely to be minimal.

The online tool has been in operation almost since the time the Good Food Junction Coop closed. It can save you time by shortening your time in line waiting for a cashier and save you from going shopping when a grocery store is extremely busy. Best of all, adoption and use of this locally developed tech tool doesn't promote loss of cashier jobs, it promotes the hiring of more cashiers. Access this tool from home to see existing cashier check out wait-times or use your smart phone to report your wait time at cow8yxe.ca.

Covid-19 Related - besides providing check out wait times information you can also provide or view information on what the grocery store is doing to combat the spread of airborn contagions and how well stocked the grocery store is.

Grocery Store Check-Out Wait Times

There are few things more frustrating about living in Saskatoon than the constantly increasing property taxes, ill-timed traffic lights, closed-for-construction streets and avenues, and train or accident caused traffic delays. Some say Saskatoon has two seasons, Winter and Construction. To its credit Saskatoon has a tool that allows you to see which streets and avenues it has closed for construction. Access it here: https://www.saskatoon.ca/news-releases/daily-road-report-may-27-2019 for week day reports, and here: https://www.saskatoon.ca/news-releases/weekend-road-report-may-25-26-2019Sed for weekend reports.

You can report and view train and accident caused traffic delays here: http://traintrackeryxe.ca or http://traintrackrstn.ca This locally developed on-line tool can be accessed through your smart phone or laptop and doesn't use supercookies to track your browsing habits or require access to your cell phone files or camera or location data to work. Best of all, you can report just about anything that may affect traffic flow through the site, including police traffic stops.

Train and other Traffic Obstructions