Kids love garbage collectors. When the truck shows up on garbage day, one garbage truck driver describes it like this: “Moms hold babies at the door, toddlers wait at the window and sometimes a whole family will come out to watch and wave.”

“It makes you feel like a rock star,” he said.

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi should be so lucky. When it comes to garbage, the mayor is no rock star. He’s between a rock and a hard place. For the city administration, garbage day is garbage duress.

After years of trying, the city still has not found a site to replace Oʻahu’s only landfill, which is scheduled to close for good in 2028.

Without a new landfill there will be no place to put garbage. Period. And there are no acceptable alternatives right now. Period, plus exclamation mark.

As the mayor recently said about selecting a site, “If there was a path that the whole island supported, then that is the path that we would have chosen, but it wasn’t that simple because the path simply does not exist.”

“And this is important,” he continued. “The city must construct a new landfill, there is no path forward for us that does not involve the creation of a new landfill on Oʻahu.”

This Oʻahu landfill situation indicates how hard, maybe even impossible, it is to use democratic processes to deal with an imminent and critical environmental crisis.

Garbage And Democracy

The basic political processes that normally make democracies work are in this case working against solving the problem.

For democracy to work, officials have to follow established rules that have been set and nested in our society. They may be excellent rules appropriately reflecting public values and democratic norms, but the fact remains they have made this problem impossible to solve.

Last week the city did kind of, sort of, choose a site in Wahiawā, but right now that’s not even close to a done deal because it remains iffy whether that site meets the rules. On the surface, it does not. More on this later.

Finding the right landfill site is stymied due to two circumstances that under the right circumstance can make policymaking easier: One of these is about science, the other is about politics.

The process of landfill site location is well developed and used worldwide. It takes all the relevant site selection criteria, analyzes it statistically and comes out with a list of acceptable sites, which are typically displayed in a colorful map that’s easy to understand.

And, drum roll please, there you have it. A list of acceptable sites based on the criteria provided, ready for the public to weigh in on.

In the Oʻahu case, however, there is plenty of good, state-of-the-art science that doesn’t act as Hank the Helper. It acts as The Grim Reaper.

There is no list of the best options because there is no list at all. There is not a single site on the island that meets the criteria.

The Wahiawā site the city has semi-selected comes the closest but arguably — and there sure will be arguments, which have begun already — fails because it does not meet the gold standards of location science.

Politics: Not Enough Tools In The Toolbox

“Dire” and “imminent,” two words that are poison to politicians. “We gotta do something right now!” is much scarier than, “Let’s take a look to see if there is anything we need to do.”

Deferring a decision is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good purposes as well as bad ones.

Remember how many times the Honolulu City Council deferred deciding on vacation rentals? Just last week, it did the same with the vacant house tax bill. Now, there are both good reasons and bad reasons for those two decisions, each of which gave the council breathing space.

The Wahiawā site is distant-galaxy far from a done deal.

In the landfill case, though, the city is up against a hard deadline. The existing site can probably be used for maybe four years. The estimate is that it will take eight years to build a new landfill. Other alternatives, like shipping our garbage elsewhere, are very expensive and legally complex.

A lot of the usual that’s-government-at-work delays drive people crazy, but the consequences are typically not so immediate. So, we still don’t have a new stadium yet. Not such a big thing. Or a completed rail system. Or even affordable housing. For better or worse, the public adjusts.

Siting a landfill is a cut above.

A Stark Look At Where We Stand

First of all, the deadline for solving this is firm, so firm that under the circumstances it will be hard to meet even under the best circumstances.

Second, there are no good alternatives to building a landfill. Producing less waste is definitely a good idea, but the reduction wonʻt be enough to solve the immediate problem.

Third, the selection criteria won’t change. Maybe they should. They read like a wish list for a group trying to keep affordable housing out of its neighborhood. A new landfill can’t be on conservation land or federal land. There has to be a half-mile buffer from residential property, schools and hospitals. Because of water criteria about which the Board of Water Supply is being very militant, it has to be away from tsunami inundation zones and the Waiʻanae Coast.

When everything is sacred, compromise and flexibility are impossible.

Fourth, the Wahiawā site is distant-galaxy far from a done deal. The city claims it can build the landfill in a way that meets the water requirements, but there are no specifics yet. In addition, big surprise, politicians representing the site area already have objections.

Finally, if the Wahiawā site is contested, it could end up in court. Courts are not saviors as much as they are ponderers. Litigation takes time. That’s to the advantage of those who want to stymie the site.

And that’s what I mean when I said the landfill selection process is a threat to the capacity of democracy, because really, democracy is doing its job here: rule-following, accountability, obeying the law. But that’s making the challenge impossible to meet.

Deliberation is an essential part of democracy. It’s good people doing their job as citizens and representatives of citizens.

But, hey, we got an environmental disaster on our hands, and it is imminent. People in Hawaiʻi have gotten used to a serious crisis suddenly disappearing, as in the Thirty Meter Telescope.

The need for a new landfill site is different. It’s not going away. And that means it may end up in your own backyard in spite of everything.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Atherton Family Foundation, Swayne Family Fund of Hawaiʻi Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and Papa Ola Lokahi.