Brent Harold / Journal

Wellfleet’s new pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) transfer station policy has incurred unexpected rancor in its first month. There have been a facebook analogies to Nazi German and petitions to recall two selectmen.

About 40% of Massachusetts towns (and counting) have gone PAYT, but as with the U.S. and single- payer healthcare, evidence that something works well elsewhere doesn’t convince us that it would work in this town.

The logic of PAYT is that having to buy bags for what you deposit at the TS, as opposed to just paying a sticker fee, will encourage recycling and thus reduce the total amount of trash we pay to get hauled elsewhere. Since the fee for that hauling is going up by three or four times in a couple of years, lowering that fee will mean substantial savings. According to Richard Willecke, chairman of our board of health, other towns using PAYT report an average doubling of the amount of recycling.

So what’s all the fuss about? Mike Rice, perhaps the most vocal opponent, said in a column in the “Cape Codder” that the “vast majority” of Wellfleetians are angry about PAYT. “Wellfleet doesn’t have a recycling problem” so that the improvement found elsewhere just wouldn’t apply to our superior town.

He speaks darkly of a “money grab” by town officials.

“Many people,” says Rice, are avoiding the burden of buying purple bags by illegally dumping garbage in the woods and public receptacles or resorting to private haulers.

Rice admits that “vast majority” is just his impression. When it comes to impressions, my own based on friends and acquaintances, for what it’s worth, is that most of us are in favor or at least willing to give PAYT a try. A worker at the TS the other day said he judged that about 95% seemed happy enough with the program.

In any case, the recall petitions have fallen 200 or so short of the required 500-plus signatures. Rice said he spent three weeks parked all day long at the TS collecting signatures; his wife was seen going door- to -door, beating the bushes.

When asked about that alleged “money grab”, Rice says he doesn’t mean that any town officials are out for personal gain. If there is money being grabbed, who would be benefitting, if not citizens in the form of not having tripled TS stickers when the tipping fees go up?

As for illegal dumping, according to Willecke, the town’s health agent says she is not aware of any increase in illegal dumping.
Lezli Rowell, who as a member of the board of health voted for PAYT but seems to have had second thoughts, is sensitive to what seems like a shift of some of the trash burden to young families, estimating that some could pay 300 dollars in purple bags in a year.

Mustering my admittedly elementary math skills, it’s hard for me to figure out how the largest, sloppiest young family could use that many bags. My son and his partner, age 26, with two kids in diapers, estimates from their first month that they may be spending $60 a year (minus the reduction in the TS sticker). He has a friend who, in reaction to PAYT, intends to use a private hauler at 10 bucks a week. That’s around $500. a year. What’s the financial logic of that?

In case of genuine need, help with buying the bags is being provided (although obviously that cancels the incentive to recycle.)

It may not be a p urely money issue. Rice suspects that people, some people, are mad because PAYT didn’t go to town meeting. There were numerous well advertised open hearings over a couple of years, some of them well attended, so the board of health was hardly trying to sneak it through. But perhaps the only thing in this town that trumps the virtue of recycling is the virtue of being able to debate and vote on in TM anything of consequence. According to Willecke, TM is not empowered, according to state law, to enact health measures, which PAYT is considered. But he admits that in retrospect it might have been better to ask TM for a non- binding resolution on the subject.