Stratford has to become debt free

Upon my recent return to Stratford the Fair I was shocked to find out that the City of Stratford has amassed a debt of almost $65 million, a total that would be the “envy” of some of the world’s smaller nations.

I’ll not go into the obvious like “How in the world did this happen?” – at least not in this letter – but I will offer a potential solution.  

The City of Ottawa is currently building a plasma incinerator. The fuel used to operate this new technology is something everybody has a lot of – garbage. It burns completely clean and its waste is a commercially viable ash. The other main byproduct is electricity. I am sure that other cities are already considering getting such a facility so we should get on the list of customers ASAP.

Another “product” that we have in abundance is sewage. Existing technologies already in proven use convert human and other animals’ excretions into methane which is then used to create electricity. We build a plasma incinerator at the landfill and a methane digester at the sewage treatment plant. That’s the infrastructure.

Now how does the above proposal solve our debt problem? Simple. Even with the large initial cost of creating such facilities it’s worth the investment as the energy produced would now be going into the community’s electrical grid. I do not know what percentage of the total electricity we now get from the regional grid system would be reduced but even if we only were to generate the equivalent of 20 per cent that would result in a substantial reduction in the total cost of electricity in this village.

We then use the money saved to amortize the debt and over a span of oh, let’s say 30 or 40 years, our current debt, including the cost of building and maintaining the generating systems, would be gone.

I believe that it is essential to the longterm viability of the City of Stratford that such an effort be made because if it is not, the property taxes in Stratford in 30 or 50 years are going to be so high that no one will want to live here. Debts, no matter how large or small, have a nasty tendency to grow at astonishing rates over relatively short periods of time and why set up shop or live in Stratford when you can do the same in a similar-sized community with a far lower cost of living or manufacturing?  

The future belongs to communities that are debt free and as low in dependence on outsourced forms of energy as is fiscally possible. Where do you want your grandchildren to live ?

Matthew Murphy
Stratford