At his weekly press conference this morning, Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves said the UWF Haas Center has 1,556 eligible responses to its residents satisfaction survey that can be weighted for the final report.
The survey asked the citizens if they would be willing to pay $8 to $10 more a month to have recycling at the curb.
“And so 50% of our residents said that they would be willing to pay the $8-$10 more month,” said the mayor. “Now we also understand there’s a big difference between answering that question on a survey and then when the bill comes, will you be committed to it? So conservatively, if we were to say half of those folks would actually pull through and say we have 21,000 accounts. In my mind. that gives us a conservative estimate of maybe 5,000 to 5,500 accounts would be willing to do it when it comes down to putting it on your bill.”
The City has passed the information to ECUA and Waste Management to see if they have any interest in handling the curbside recycling.
“Is there enough critical mass to get that price into a feasible range?” Mayor Reeves said. “We’ll wait to hear back from both of them.”
There is demand for “canned goods on the steel side, aluminum steel cans, plastic bottles like two-liter Coke bottles, and then the heavier plastic, like detergent bottles and milk jugs.”
The mayor said, “We’re going to take an effort internally to be able to offer something temporarily where, in the next 30 days, we’re hoping to have set up perhaps a once-a-week recycling drop-off at our transfer station on Leonard. We’d have a city staff person there and you’d be able to just drive up, drop off your recyclables there and we’d take them right at the transfer station.”
The city is talking with the American Beverage Association about possible grants to help with recycling.
Mayor Reeves expects the results of the UWF Haas study to be released by mid-October.
Bay Bluffs
Mayor Reeves tried to clear up some confusion over the closed Bay Bluffs park. He said, “We have never said that we would demolish Bay Bluffs Park and not replace it permanently. That has never been said and obviously there’s some emails I’m getting, I think there’s been a miscommunication as far as that indefinite. All we’re saying is it’s not definitive in terms of when we would have the funding to rebuild.”
The walkway has to be demolished because it’s a public safety hazard. The estimated cost to replace exceeds $1 million. The mayor said, “We couldn’t find a scenario that allowed us to go put boards in certain places and then be able to continue to say that it’s a safe place.”
He cautioned that the new park may be different.
“There’s a very real possibility that it is not going to be replaced verbatim the way it’s set up right now,” Mayor Reeves said. “There might be walking path elements of it. Maybe the boardwalk goes a different direction for cost reasons, for safety reasons than otherwise. This park was designed 40 years ago. A lot of erosions happened since then. A lot of other things have happened since then. So it’s much more likely that this park ends up with some kind of really in a new version when it is funded than what sits out there today.”
Baptist Discussions
Mayor Reeves was very positive about his Tuesday morning meeting with Baptist Hospital.
“We are very much aligned and knowing that the impact of what this legacy campus can be, how it is important to the surrounding community, how it’s important to the future of the city,” he said. “I’m confident in our team, and I just don’t have to sign up to do things that we can’t execute. We wanted to make sure that aligned on things that we think are realistic and that we across the finish, so very excited to continue those conversations and to get something solidified moving forward.”
While the City might not have a signed agreement soon, he expects to have sufficient assurances from Baptist to ask lawmakers for the millions needed to demolish the hospital and medical towers. In return, Baptist will donate the property, about 36 acres, to the City.”
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Mayor Reeves is stuck holding the bag on a problem that has been building for years with the way we conduct recycling in this country: it’s totally unfeasible.
If we wanted to fix recycling across the board, it should be limited to 2 or 3 categories of materials that can actually be used in some fashion post recycling, rather than filling up recycling centers all over the country to rot and sending our most toxic waste overseas.
Even NPR and Greenpeace get this:
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“Recycling plastic is practically impossible — and the problem is getting worse”
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse
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Recycling everything possible has been pounded into people’s brains over generations now, so it’s going to be very difficult for people to let go of the justifiably cherished belief that responsible recycling–as it’s currently conducted–is a big boon to the environment.
Worse still, if a lot of people understood where their specially recycled electronics and thermometers ended up, they’d probably be less thrilled at paying to have something shipped to a poor country and thrown on the beaches there:
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“This California city asked where its recycling went. The answer wasn’t pretty.
Palo Alto found that some 60% of its recyclables got shipped abroad, with little transparency as to their fate.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/palo-alto-recycling-asia-garbage-waste-rcna58633
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Recycling is not a City of Pensacola Problem–it’s a One Big Mess problem. I really admire Mayor Reeves for respecting his constituency enough to talk straight about this issue. We’ve got to have honest discussions about how to do this better all over the country; we need to spend money on better technology to compress or neutralize more of the waste and give up the dream that all of these products can and will be reused. That’s going to be a tough nut for a lot of people who care about our environment to swallow, since recycling was so effectively packaged and pushed as the golden ring of environmental responsibility. Hey, the companies that produce all this plastic had to come up with something to distract everybody from all those trees they were cutting down and the metric tons of 50 trillion pieces of microplastic in our oceans that aren’t scheduled for curbside pickup any time soon.
Recycling: The City should let ECUA provide sanitation services inside the city. ECUA offered to do so in 2009. ECUA will provide a higher level of service at a lower cost. Let city residents keep their current city cans so PPD knows which houses are “in” the city. In at least one case, one side of a street is in the city and the other is “out in the county.”
Bay Bluffs Park: People are using the park. I saw it on Saturday. The City has known about the need to renovate the boardwalk since prior to 2017 when the project was put in the current Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) ten-year budget. However, any general fund revenues can be used for the project to include revenues from Public Utility Taxes (that county residents do not have to pay). The Council budgeted $100,000 for the project and then increased the amount to $200,000 but it was never spent. The City has long had and still has much more than $1 million to replace the boardwalk and make many other improvements to the park. For sure, the bike lanes along that area need to be made much wider too. They’re unsafe given the expressway speeds people drive. The Council should appoint a committee to identify what people want done at Bay Bluffs Park. Have a consultant come up with a price. Ask Councilman Bare to squeeze out the obvious waste in the budget to find the money. It might take him all of 30 minutes.
Old Baptist Campus: Option #1 is for Baptist to donate the entire campus to the City and get out of the way. Option #2 is for the City to offer the buy the entire campus for $1. Option #3 is for the City to exercise its powers of eminent domain to take the entire campus and then hire someone to objectively assess the structural integrity of all of the buildings on the campus. Let the Architectural Review Board tour the buildings and brainstorm on potential reuses. I’ve come up with a dozen ideas for the campus to include a Charter Middle School. In 2014 and 2016, the City, County and Baptist published two reports that describe the potential of the campus area then assuming that the hospital would stay in place. On the city’s website, I can only find a “draft” copy of the 2016 report so I don’t know if it was ever approved. By late December 2016, Baptist had already decided to move and within months formed a shell corporation to begin, as the PNJ later wrote, “quietly” buying up new properties, delaying public notice of its intent until 2019. The city then sat on its hands from 2019 to present not doing much. The City had its maximum leverage in 2021 when Baptist asked to have the new campus annexed into the city limit. The City should have asked for the old campus in exchange.