My wife, Michelle, works for the City of Garland's sanitation department as the Environmental and Community Outreach Coordinator. (Yes, there is precedence for a Garland city employee's spouse to serve on Garland council - most recently being the Hon. David Gibbons and his late husband Mark Wilson who served as the Event Director of The Atrium.)
Michelle is dedicated to extending the life of our landfill and spends countless hours researching best practices for recycling. Extending the life of our landfill will save Garland residents countless tax dollars, and for that, I am extremely thankful for my wife's work.
Before Michelle was hired by Garland, recycling seemed foreign to me. I came of age in the mid-1980s during a time when everything was disposable. The glass soda bottles that my parents had returned to the store for a refund on their deposit were replaced with single-use plastic bottles. Paper bags were replaced with plastic bags. The paper straws at Woolworths were replaced with plastic too. Even cars became disposable in the 70s and 80s, and that sentiment was enshrined in 1981 when the late Merle Haggard sang, "I wish a Ford and a Chevy would still last ten years like they should."
As much as things had changed from my parent's generation to my own, the cavern was much wider when compared to my grandparents' frame of reference. My grandmother never used a paper or a plastic bag, she had a metal shopping buggy that she walked back and forth from the grocery. I mention this because renewables aren't new, they just skipped a couple of generations. Not all, but some renewables make an incredible amount of fiscal sense and could go a long way to improving the appearance and safety of our neighborhoods.
Lighting, both on residential streets and in downtown parking lots, is always a concern when talking to District 2 residents. Tying potential lighting solutions to our existing electric grid isn't fiscally feasible or financially responsible. We already know what our summer electric bills look like. But, let's talk about renewables like solar-powered streetlights. This is an affordable technology that exists and could be implemented by neighborhood associations, HOAs, and even the city council in some of the darker parking lots downtown.
Safer streets are a part of better streets, and better streets make for great neighborhoods, and great neighborhoods across all of District 2 is one of my primary goals.
