Slaying the Nimby Dragon

Herbert Inhaber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781560002192
• eBook ISBN: 9781351490801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A mob scene erupted in April 1990 in the sleepy hamlet of Caneada, a small town on the northern edge of the Allegheny Mountains. In addition to riots and numerous arrests, six senior citizens, handcuffed to a heavy chain, formed a human barricade across the steel bridge spanning the Genesee River. Their purpose was to prevent the siting commission

1

A NIMBY Overview:
How it has Prevented the Establishment of Needed Facilities

Advanced societies around the world are facing a dilemma of gigantic proportions: What to do with all the facilities that everyone desires in principle, but wants to keep out of their own block? The phenomenon is called NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard.

It may seem to be a far-fetched problem that does not affect most of us. Yet it looms bigger than we imagine. Hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, have been spent to overcome it. Some of the most talented engineers and scientists, whose skills could be applied to more productive activities, have devoted years to defeating it. And it still remains.

The dragons of legend used to roam the countryside, wreaking destruction wherever they wanted. Because of the pervasive nature of NIMBY, I have labeled it a “dragon” in the title of this book. It has indeed burned up the detailed plans of administrators, politicians, and scientists.

Nobody knows exactly how much damage the mythical dragons caused. But the problems produced by NIMBY are well documented. In the rest of this chapter, I will give only a few examples. A complete listing might fill a library shelf.

At least one dragon would continue to ravage villages if it had not been for St. George, who slew it. A mere compilation of NIMBY problems would be inadequate without a proposed solution. The modern-day analogy to St. George’s sword—the reverse Dutch auction—will be revealed later in this book. Briefly, it attempts to use both environmental science and economics to wipe out NIMBY, conclusively. I believe that it will work, and we can go on to better things.

Acronyms and Definitions

The NIMBY field is full of abbreviations. Let’s go over them briefly, so we can understand what people have said on the subject. However, in the rest of this book I will try to keep acronyms to a minimum.

NIMTOO—Not In My Term Of Office—is sometimes used by elected officials confronted by a NIMBY decision. That is, we will solve the NIMBY problem just as soon as I retire from this office. The phrase is a bit unfair to politicians, who are often merely reflecting what their constituents want or do not want.

LULUs—Locally Unwanted Land Uses—is the generic term for all the facilities to which people object: landfills, prisons, radioactive waste sites, AIDS treatment centers, and so on. This acronym is used extensively, since it encompasses all the facilities that create NIMBY opposition.

The nuclear energy field, subject of much NIMBY controversy, has spawned its own jargon. Two phrases are “low-level” and “high-level” waste.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency have their own precise definitions of these two terms. We can think of low-level wastes as gloves or resins used in a reactor, and needles that might have contained some radioactive tracer material in medicine. These wastes are slightly radioactive—you could be in a room with them without suffering much increased risk.

High-level wastes come only from nuclear reactors. They are mostly the spent nuclear fuel rods from which electricity has been produced. These are highly radioactive. You would not want to go near where they were stored.

What about hazardous wastes, which seem to be related in some way to the two previous terms? Hazardous wastes are specific chemicals and compounds that have been identified by the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bodies as posing some type of hazard to human health or the environment. The hazards vary considerably from one chemical to another.

The risks of all these sources—hazardous, low-and high-level wastes—vary, depending on how close you are to them, and how many of these materials you breathe or drink. Most people are unhappy with any wastes in their back yard, whether those wastes are fairly benign or highly toxic.

For those who are unalterably opposed to undesirable facilities, ever, at any time, place or condition, other phrases exist. They are NIABY—Not In Anybody’s Back Yard—and NOPE—Not On Planet Earth. The idea behind these phrases is that the wastes should not have been created in the first place.

Those seeking a solution to NIMBY might say:

• Is it better to build a new prison that offers some chance of rehabilitation of prisoners? Or is it better to confine them to a century-old structure, overcrowded and under court order to be torn down?

• Is it better to keep radioactive wastes in the back rooms of a hospital or a nuclear reactor, storage areas which were never designed to hold them for decades? Or is it better to build a special structure that will meet all environmental rules and regulations?

Calvin Brunner, a Virginia-based waste industry consultant and the author of several books on waste disposal, thinks NIMBY will gradually produce an overwhelming crisis. In an article entitled “NIMBYists Put Society at Risk”, he wrote: “Will our inability to come to grips with pollution force revolution on us? [emphasis in original]…there may be too much democracy in America…this would eventually lead to anarchy…[producing] a lack of respect for institutions, people in power and for everything and everyone.”¹

Could Brunner be exaggerating for the sake of effect? In this book, I avoid the name calling that has characterized much of the NIMBY debate. I avoid labeling as “NIMBYists” those who do not want undesirable facilities near them, even though Brunner does. I have a certain sympathy for them, as will be shown later. Name calling, regardless of the merits of the case, does nothing to produce a solution to NIMBY. A solution is what this book produces.

Being Canadian by birth, I am alert to NIMBY events there. Jim Temple, an official of a Canadian waste handling company, wrote: “A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing a Mayor from a Nova Scotia municipality tell a most inspiring story of community activism. She told how she and her constituents put up a valiant struggle to keep a regional waste disposal site out of her community. The Mayor and her followers applied political leverage, recruited a sympathetic press and put in a lot of long hours of hard campaigning.”²

He noted that the Mayor had kept the dump out of her town. But then she gave a public speech in triumph, to tell the world what a wonderful thing she had done. She was asked by a member of the audience: “Madam Mayor, where does your community’s waste go [now]?” to which she replied, “It goes into the community that did accept a regional site.” Second question: “Can you, Madam Mayor, honestly say that the community that got the regional site is better suited to receiving waste than your community is?” Her answer was, “No. The site ultimately chosen was technically poorer than the site proposed in our community.”

Temple concluded, “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s what NIMBY is all about.”

Recycling

Some demonstrators at battles over landfills have said. “We don’t really need this new dump. If we just recycled our wastes, we could put the remainder in the present landfill. This new one is being built just because we’re wasteful.”

Nigel Guilford, another waste management official at the very same conference as Jim Temple, said:

I visited a plant in Vienna in 1981. It was brand new, cost $60 million, had twin rotary kilns, twin fluidized beds and sludge incinerators, a heat recovery system, power production, beautiful labs, and physical-chemical treatment. But there were also concrete blocks on the conveyors, tree stumps in [the] receiving area, tires piled up in the receiving area, guys walking around with no hard hats in the areas where they were unloading drums of solvents, no goggles, and smoking cigarettes. Sixty million dollars had been spent on [hardware] but the system as a whole didn’t work. When I was back in Europe earlier this year, I learned that the Vienna plant had been closed down.³

Suppose that recycling could reduce waste X by half. Would opposition to siting that waste be halved? I doubt it. The biggest nuclear waste riot in the U.S. occurred over low-level waste, much less harmful than high-level waste. Observers conclude that most members of the public do not distinguish between large and small amounts of waste, nor their relative toxicity.

To take another example, some years back Mercedes-Benz, in one of their ads, showed their longest-running vehicle, still rolling along. As I recall, it had gone about 750,000 miles. We could build cars to last longer than present ones, although the average person might not want a vehicle to last fifty years at an average use of 15,000 miles annually. Even if we increased the lifetime of cars substantially, there would still be some auto graveyards. Like death and taxes, at least some wastes will always be with us.

Recycling is part of public policy in many countries. In some areas, it proceeds naturally, without the intervention of governments. For example, photo developers recover the silver they use, because it is so valuable. As far as I know, this has always been done, without any government regulations. On the other hand, some government rules require recycling, regardless of economics. The regulations in some states on bottle deposits probably fall into that category.

When People are Involved, Not Just Wastes

Recycling can improve some parts of the NIMBY problem, without question. This in turn may decrease public battles over undesirable facilities. Yet, there are areas of NIMBY that are not concerned with inanimate objects like wastes, but with people. These situations do not lend themselves to recycling. Consider a few examples.

People walked around in the parking lot of an A&P store in Wanaque, New Jersey.⁴ Signs were displayed, “Keep AIDS out of Wanaque!” Another said, “We Need State Aid, not AIDS from the State.” One of the protesters, Ken Higgins, described himself as a big believer in the Not In My Back Yard theory: “Those AIDS people come from a degenerate society. I’m talking about sex and degenerates passing drug needles in Newark. They don’t want them in Newark. Newark says Nimby. Well, don’t put them in our backyard. We believe in Nimby too! Nimby! You said it, Nimby! That’s what we believe.”

A convalescent home in Wanaque had agreed to take 120 AIDS patients. At the time, New Jersey had the fifth highest number of AIDS cases nationally; Passaic County, in which Wanaque is located, had the third highest AIDS level in the state. But it was clear that many of the patients would be coming from outside the town.

The state of New Jersey decided not to hold public meetings on the move. Paul Langevin, the assistant state health commissioner, when asked about a meeting, said, “Should we have? Perhaps, but we’re trying to play it down.”

Many of the protesters shouted and screamed. Mike Ryan, a civic leader, said: “If they’re drug abusers, they belong in the inner city and who knows where they’re from if they’re homosexual. I don’t have anything against them, but why should they be next to my house? Who’s going to visit a drug addict? Who’s going to visit a homosexual? Another homosexual! They go after your children.”

A local priest, Angelo Gambatese, who was watching the demonstrators, said: “This is Good Friday. Good Friday! This is terrible.” Now on to something more pleasant, the bright and shining faces of little children. Surely those innocents do not have anything to do with NIMBY. Or do they?

Consider someone trying to set up a day care center for the children of her neighborhood, so that working mothers did not have to drag their offspring all over town. She had just finished putting up the new wallpaper, with images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, when she hears some noises outside the window. More demonstrators. Only this time they were not complaining about AIDS. Their object was the day care center: “Kids get out! You’ll ruin the neighborhood! Kids get out!”

According to Michael Coughlin of the Massachusetts Office for Children, forty to fifty communities in the Bay State have faced controversies of this type.⁵ Sandra Gellert, president of the National Association for Family Day Care, says it’s “an ongoing problem everywhere.”

This event took place at Elaine Sibley’s eight-room ranch house in Westwood, Massachusetts. Mrs. Sibley, mother of two, had wanted to open a center for only six pre-school children. She had a certificate in early childhood education, experience in working with very young children, and a state day care license.

Not enough, neighbors said. They petitioned to block the day care center.

The business would create traffic and noise. The neighborhood would go to the dogs. Their property values would plummet. Of course, good day care from qualified teachers such as Mrs. Sibley was an absolute necessity, but Not In…

There were a few people who did not agree with the marchers, such as Susan Twombley of the Child Care Resource Center in Cambridge. She said, “I understand some concerns, but children need to exist somewhere. If they can’t be in residential areas, where can they be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. A NIMBY Overview: How it has Prevented the Establishment of Needed Facilities
• 2. A Personal Story: How I Went from Nerdism to Devising Siting Solutions
• 3. What Doesn’t Work in Siting Unwanted Facilities
• 4. What Can Work—The Reverse Dutch Auction Slays the NIMBY Dragon
• 5. What the NIMBY Literature Tells Us
• 6. Perception and Psychology of Unwelcome Guests
• 7. Economics of Auctions
• 8. Compensation and Its Relation to Auctions
• 9. Some Examples of How Dollars and the Environment Can be Compatible
• 10. The Rich and the Poor: Will an Auction System Discriminate against the Latter?
• 11. The Reverse Dutch Auction Offers an Exit from the Maze
• Index