"Dear Tazewell County Attorney's Office," my latest Facebook post begins. "We did receive your letter regarding our waste disposal practices. Compliance with this will not be an issue on our end. You can expect an extra two hundred pounds of solid, possibly infectious waste to be deposited in the municipal landfill every week. This will actually be easier for us than our current method of burning organic refuse. All we have to do now is dump and run, and fill out some kind of annual report. You forget we're a 501c3, state-reporting agency. Submitting annual reports is what we do."
Who says comedy has to be fiction? This happened. This is real. I really did get a certified letter through the U.S. Mail telling me I can't burn dog poop. These people are serious. I can't help but wonder, though, about that poor secretary having to sit there typing that up with a straight face. "Sorry, Tazewell ARC, but your weekly shit-e-ques are big no-nos. Can't have all that processed beef byproduct going up in smoke. Gotta guarantee the landfill rats get dinner, and that the scavenging coyotes and fox and raccoon pick up all those canine diseases from your quarantine room. We made darn sure it's illegal to actually destroy your pathogens. You know how those tree-huggers came down on us about them pearlymussels. . .can't take no chances they're going to complain about our parvoviruses, too."
Tazewell ARC tends to be very outspoken about problems in our community, particularly those concerning animals. This keeps us crossways not only with community members, but with community leaders and elected officials. Much of the controversy is documented here, on Steemshelves. But I'm in it to win it, and in truth, hauling our solid waste to the dump rather than burning it isn't a big enough hassle to quibble over. We will comply. Eventually it will be burned at the landfill, too, at taxpayer expense, with no added benefit to the environment. This is just one more example of bureaucratic insanity and the failure to apply good sense.