Newspaper Publisher Wages War With Garbage Fee Opponents

NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER WAGES WAR WITH GARBAGE FEE OPPONENTS     

      Printed below is a copy of a newspaper editorial written by News-Review Publisher Jeff Ackerman. I welcome a free press and I applaud a newspaper serving a community by taking an editorial stand on issues of interest. However, Ackerman's obsession with promoting a garbage dumping fee at the Douglas County landfill and transfer stations deserves a response.

     Ackerman has only lived in the area a few years, but he seems determined to overturn a decades-old tradition of free dumping in Douglas County. It should be noted that the previous three News-Review publishers, dating back to Phil Neiswanger in the 1970s, were rarely seen on the newspaper's editorial page. Quite appropriately, whenever they chose to wrote an editorial, it was anonymous. In other words, an editorial was the "voice" of the newspaper's editorial board, and a reader would never know which editor might have authored the editorial.

     Then comes along Jeff Ackerman. Writing an anonymous pro-garbage dumping fee editorial under the newspaper's opinion page masthead is not enough. Ackerman begins writing a personal column, something not previously pursued by past publishers, and so now he can promote his one-sided opinion TWICE: in the newspaper's editorial at the top of the opinion page, and through his personal column at the bottom of the opinion page.

     And the News-Review publisher takes advantage of the power of the press. During the past week alone, readers have been subjected to TWO pro-garbage dumping fee editorials. This makes it difficult for a reader to respond to Ackerman's ongoing tirades, considering that readers are limited to one letter per month for a letter to the editor.

     But in all honesty, there really isn't much of anything new to respond to in Ackerman's editorials. They all contain the same message with a slight change of wording. For example, in talking about how reasonable a $7.00 fee would be for consumers, Ackerman will change the cost of buying a pizza, to the cost of buying a McDonald's value meal (as cited in Ackerman's editorial below). The bottom line, is that Ackerman uses the same misplaced logic in all of his editorials: If a person can afford to purchase one meal at a restaurant, then they can afford paying $7.00 a week to dump their garbage.

     If Ackerman wants to waste precious newsprint space to promote his personal agenda on a daily basis, then at least one of his editorials should address the following question: What about the people who can't afford to eat out at a restaurant once a week? Where will a disabled person, who receives less money from Social Security than Oregon's minimum wage, find the extra $28.00 a month to dump their garbage?

      The answer to the above question ironically lies in Ackerman's editorial, printed below. Ackerman sarcastically suggests that voters could decide which county service they want to cut, in order to sustain free garbage dumping in Douglas County.
     Cutting library services is one option listed in Ackerman's list. Why not charge a fee for library users? Why shouldn't the county library system be self-sustaining, if the public works department is required to be self-sustaining? People have the CHOICE of checking out a book at the county library. They DON'T have a choice when it comes to disposing of their garbage on a weekly basis.

     I will always defend the right of anyone to express an opinion. However, I will protest (as I am doing in this blog entry) when a person who is supposed to be an ethical journalist, abuses their position to promote their own personal agenda. 

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PUBLISHED IN THE ROSEBURG NEWS-REVIEW, DECEMBER 21, 2014

     So it appears Douglas County will continue to be the only county west of the Mississippi where residents can dump their garbage at the landfill for free.

      Never mind that the landfill isn’t really free. It’s costing the county more than $2 million annually that it doesn’t really have to spend and the economic horizon is getting darker by the day.

     The mostly-lame-duck three-member commission had a chance to fix that last week, but voted instead to table a proposed dump fee in order to better explain how screwed Douglas County’s financial condition really is.

     Two of those three members – Mike Winters and Joe Laurance – won’t have to explain how screwed the county is financially because they will be off the commission in a week or so.

Laurance wanted to adopt the fee proposal but was out-gunned by Winters and Susan Morgan, who voted to table it.

     I stood in the back of last week’s county commission meeting for a couple of hours listening to a parade of people march to the podium to speak against a proposal that would have raised the dump fee from free (and…for the record…free implies that the dump has no value) to a whopping $7 per vehicle, or roughly the price of a quarter pounder with cheese, large fries and Pepsi.

Many who marched to the podium demanded that the issue be brought to the voters.

“All in favor of a free dump site, raise your hands!”

The better ballot question should read like this:

“Do You Favor A Free Dump? If Yes, please check one of the following proposed $2 million budget cuts:”

a) Lay off 10 deputies.

b) Eliminate 10 prosecutors.

c) Close the library.

d) Don’t fix the roads for the next 10 years.

e) Close the jail and free 100 inmates.

f) All of the above.

     The county’s Public Works Director Robb Paul began the hearing by trying his best to explain the math behind the proposed dump fees that would have gone into effect in July.

      He said the county has been able to provide a free landfill because its budget was always boosted by federal timber dollars and what they call “safety net” payments. But those timber dollars have been carried away to a spotted owl nest and then eaten by a bard owl.

    “It (free dump) is something that for the last 40 years we haven’t had to pay because the federal government has paid it for us,” Paul told us in a story prior to the commission’s inaction.

     But federal safety net funds dropped to around $9 million last year, half of what they were in 2010 and last week the U.S. Senate pretty much put the final nail in our coffin by removing that safety net, leaving us and other rural Oregon counties hanging out to dry.

     Jeff Ackerman is publisher of The News-Review. He can be reached at 541-957-4263 or jackerman@nrtoday.com.