In the 1980s, the Department of Sanitation wished to build at first one, then five incinerators around the City to manage solid waste. They recognized that it would be helpful to have citizen participation in designing and minimizing environmental impacts associated with these incinerators, so they set up Citizens Advisory Committees (CACs) for each borough. They funded each one of these CACs with $100,000 so that the citizens could hire a consultant to assist them in their tasks of evaluating the EIS for the incinerator in their borough. Manhattan's CAC used this money hire consultants to issue a report to recommend all the ways that the City could manage its solid waste, including waste prevention, recycling, and composting, as well as incineration. (This consultant later helped DOS write its first Solid Waste Management plan in 1992.)

This prior funding is long gone. It served a useful purpose, showing the City that it could use several methods at once to deal with the City's discards, integrated solid waste management. But the Borough Solid Waste Advisory Boards and the Citywide Recycling Advisory Boards, which were established pursuant to Local Law 19 of 1989, have had no funding since then, despite a clear need for some to help carry out the functions required in the Local Law. The SWABs are required to innovate education methods to help with recycling, to solicit public opinion in annual hearings. The SWABs have also innovated and recommended new legislation for waste prevention, have analyzed and recommended DOS research, have analyzed and recommended new budget proposals, and have analyzed and recommended new milestones for the City's solid waste management plans. But these advisory boards have had to work blind and without any outside assistance.

Funding can be used for a number of worthy purposes:

1. To pay a consultant to research a narrowly-defined, discrete question (e.g., how much does it cost to implement a QBUF (Pay as You Throw) program (cost per ton prevented).
2. To pay experts or government officials from elsewhere to come to meetings to describe successful programs that could be adopted here in NYC.
3. To reimburse advisory board members for phone calls and for research undertaken for the benefit of the boards (e.g., to research successful programs elsewhere).
4. To fund field trips to a successful solid waste operation outside the city.
5. To undertake narrowly-defined research pilots (e.g., to test very small-scale educational programs, survey research, and waste audits, perhaps conducted by college students)
6. The advisory boards could sometimes benefit from purchase of magazines, books or videos on solid waste management.
7. The SWABs/CRAB could reach out to the public in NYC and to other similar organizations via a website, and having its own website with links to useful resources can be useful to the advisory community for purposes of research.

We are gratified that the City Council has recommended that each SWAB be allocated an annual budget of $5,000, and the CRAB a budget of $10,000 so that these boards might provide more informed recommendations to the DOS and City Council on important solid waste issues. We hope the final budget reflects this allocation.