In the last of its round of public meetings held this week to get input as the V.I. Waste Management Authority develops is strategic plan, the only two St. John residents to speak both said the agency lacked sufficient funding.
“They need to get a good cash flow going,” John Levering said.
A total of four members of the St. John public attended the meeting. Haldane Davies of the University of the Virgin Islands Institute for Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness said turnout at the meetings on both St. Thomas and St. Croix was modest. He put the number at about a dozen on each island. “But there was solid information,” he said.
The VIWMA contracted with the institute to help it develop its five-year strategic plan to run from 2015 to 2020.
A resident from each island will be picked to serve on the Planning Task Force to help put together the plan.
Davies said he expects the first draft to be done by the end of September with the final document finished by January.
The gather information, Davies asked those who attended a series of six questions starting with what does VIWMA do well.
“The staff is good at returning phone calls and engaging with the community. I think they really want to do a good job,” Sharon Coldren said.
When asked what frightened her about VIWMA, she said there was a lack of a tax system to fund the authority.
Coldren also questioned why it has taken VIWMA 10 years since it was created to get up to speed.
“The will is there, the knowledge is there,” she said.
Levering pointed out, however, that without adequate funding it was difficult for the agency to go from “zero to 60.”
In further discussing the authority’s funding, Coldren said projects are often held up because the agency has to take “$300,000 from there and $300,000 from there” to fund projects rather than having the money in line and from one fund before a project starts.
Recycling is also an issue that needs to be addressed but Coldren pointed out that the territory doesn’t generate enough of any kind of recyclable waste to make it feasible for investors to build a factory to process it.
“There are unrealistic expectations on the profitability of recycling,” she said.
While Levering said that there should be some way to recycle tires in the territory instead of spending big bucks to ship them off island, Coldren said the territory doesn’t have enough waste tires to support a factory.
“They’ll go where they have tires accumulated by millions of people,” she said.
She said that while aluminum can recycling initially worked, it only happened because of volunteer labor. Coldren said that in order for it to be sustainable, it needs paid staff.
Additionally, she said the VIWMA must triplicate its efforts. Using the town of New Rochelle, N.Y., as an example, she said it has a similar size population but has to buy only one pump truck. And when that truck breaks down, the city can borrow one from a neighboring town.
