The nitty gritty on trash duty

NO ONE loves garbage.

Wet coffee grinds, leftover mystery meat and snotty tissues have their place - usually in a Dumpster. It's just that nobody gets all that excited about trash.

Garbage stinks. Garbage attracts rats. Garbage costs loads of money to burn or bury.

It's no surprise, then, that most politicians won't raise their hands to tackle the ever-maddening trash disposal problems in South Hampton Roads. Therefore, the junk and funk keep piling up.

Face it: There's no prestige in garbage. No one polishes his résumé by finding new landfill space, or boasting about the number of tons incinerated at the waste-to-energy plant, or marveling at the design of those too-small, blue recycling containers. (Cars love to crumple them, accordian-like, when they're left several feet from the curb.)

That makes you wonder: If the region's top elected officials had embraced garbage like they embrace photo-ops, would we be facing the financial morass that is today's Southeastern Public Service Authority? Would the current debt, $240 million, be as huge? Would the stakes have forced each of the eight communities that make up SPSA to come clean with their residents, long before now, about the agency's inability to pay its bills,

City mayors and their county counterparts would have ignored the mounting money woes - the inadequate tipping fees and rising debt - at their own peril. Residents would dump their complaints right at the feet of the highest-ranking official at City Hall. The elected pooh-bahs wouldn't be able to hide behind their colleagues.

True story: Nearly three years ago, then-Chesapeake Mayor Dalton Edge pleaded - repeatedly - with Councilman Alan Krasnoff to represent the city on the much-maligned SPSA board of directors. Krasnoff, who had been railing about SPSA's financial problems, and had even written a column in The Pilot about it, refused. Krasnoff's decision forced a newly elected councilman to take the spot on the waste authority's board. (Of course, Mayor Edge didn't take the spot, either.)

Krasnoff later explained he was working on his master's degree and didn't have the time in 2006 to accept the task.

So you'd think that Mayor Krasnoff - he was elected to Chesapeake's top job last year - would eagerly join SPSA's board. But you'd be wrong.

He has to serve as liaison to the Hampton Roads Metropolitan Planning Organization, you see, and the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission and the Hampton Roads Partnership. They're prestigious. There's a certain cachet involved. Those bodies make big-ticket plans, many of which won't be built in our lifetimes.

However, it's unfair to target Chesapeake's mayor alone. Most of the mayors and top supervisors of SPSA's eight localities don't sit on the agency's board. There's no political benefit in doing the responsible thing to aid SPSA and the communities. In fact, sitting on the board would be a liability.

"If you vote for a higher tipping fee at SPSA, you have to vote for a higher tipping fee at home," Mike Barrett told me Thursday. He's represented Virginia Beach on SPSA's board for the past 11 years. And the local businessman not only isn't the mayor, he isn't even on the Beach City Council.

Maybe we could simply change the name of SPSA to make it more desirable. How about the Regional Evolutionary Sanitation Collector?

It would still be garbage, though. There's not much prettifying you can do about that.

Roger Chesley is associate editor of The Pilot's editorial page. Reach him at (757) 446-2329 or roger.chesley@pilotonline.com.