Living in Dryden

Garbage truck saga moves toward conclusion

One of the many stories I'm behind on is the update on plans for re-routing garbage trucks off of local highways and back on to the interstate system. (Okay, I really think it would be smarter for them to use New York's still-amazing canal system, but apparently that doesn't fit the current reality of garbage handling.)

I've written about this a number of times, most recently noting that I thought former Assemblyman Marty Luster's telling of the story with Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton as its heroine really needed some fact-checking.

Yes, Senator Chuck Schumer is a publicity-monger, fond of cameras and press releases. But either Lifton has the world's worst sense for press, or the story pretty much runs as I'd told it earlier: when it became clear at a forum that Lifton was a barrier to moving trucks off the road, Schumer's office challenged her there and then Schumer called the governor while Lifton wrote plaintive letters to the Department of Transportation worrying about how "Some must think I'm not telling the truth."

The timing of Lifton's pieces in the Journal and her relatively low profile in this latest article do, well, absolutely nothing at all to convince me that she was actually a catalyst in getting this done. All she seems able to push is that she didn't like a particular Republican bill, without recognizing that what really did her position in was fellow Democrats. She took the same tack in her op-ed a week after the story initially broke.

Hopefully the trucks will move off the roads sooner rather than later. The DOT lately seems to be taking an interest in issues other than maximizing traffic flow on every road possible at the highest speed possible, which is a major improvement, I think.