4 November—Gone are the days when residential, commercial, industrial, and non-tax-paying property owners in Litchfield contracted with trash haulers to pick up and dispose of their garbage at Mt. Trashmore, the town’s popular dump, bureaucratically euphemized as the sanitary landfill. These days, Litchfield is one of the few towns in this miserable state that have no provision at all for property owners and users to dispose of their own garbage—as opposed to recyclable whatever—at or through a municipal transfer station. It stinks.

These days, too, so-called weight-based tipping fees town-authorized trash haulers pay to dump Litchfield’s garbage at out-of-town disposal facilities are paid by the town, a line item in the municipal budget, included in municipal taxes. That system is unfair for any number of reasons. It stinks.

One of those unfair reasons is that residential property owners who dispose of minimal garbage are thus forced to share the burden of paying the tipping fees for commercial, industrial, and non-tax-paying property owners that dispose of maximal garbage. It stinks.

But last January, the Litchfield Town Meeting passed an ordinance that somewhat relieves the tipping-fee burden of residential taxpayers. As First Selectman Denise Raap told the Litchfield-Morris Rotary Club yesterday, however, that too is imperfect—for any number of reasons. Denise is on the right track.

So how can Litchfield’s tipping-fee problem be solved and made absolutely and perfectly fair? Easy. And obvious. All the town has to do is stop paying the tipping fees and let all the private trash haulers work it out with their private customers. Customers pay the haulers for the service anyway, so why not let the haulers tack on the tipping fee, thus eliminating the municipal middle man? What can be wrong with that?

What indeed? Of course the customers and haulers are bound to bitch. But tough. Because it’s the fair way to go, the only fair way to go in the circumstance.

You wonder why Litchfield even got involved with paying garbage tipping fees in the first place, whenever that may have been? Among other things, it’s just an unnecessary administrative burden the town should never have taken on.

But even if a Litchfield Town Meeting should be forced (an easy task) in an effort to rescind that imperfect, smelly tipping-fee ordinance, the motion is guaranteed not to carry for the obvious albeit unfortunate reason that the status quo benefits the vast majority of Litchfield’s residential taxpayers . . .