City council is nearly split on how they should handle "poor" recycling stats at city facilities.
Council voted 6-5 against spending $149,000 on a new two-year position to increase waste diversion. This comes after the city discovered Adventure Bay has a 10.3% waste diversion rate out of a possible 48.9%, which highlighted the need for staff to do more.
Mayor Drew Dilkens, who was in favour of the new hire, is disappointed with the decision.
"We certainly don't practice what we preach here at City Hall, so there's an opportunity for us to do better," he says. "They would have done base audits and made sure we knew where we started and knew where we ended up, provided education, provided some advertising, provided some bins that we need."
Councillor Irek Kusmierczyk is against hiring a new employee for waste diversion and created an alternative motion.
"We have the tools internally to be able to improve waste diversion, which is an important issue without going whole hog and committing $80,000 precious dollars when we know it's going to be tight come budget time," Kusmierczyk says.
Council instead voted to spend $15,000 on more waste stations and recycling bins.
