An Amenity Authority Committee official cited environmental concerns when he declared Wednesday that The Villages Daily Sun’s weekly supplement Recreation News is adding up to thousands of “tons of waste.”
AAC member Carl Bell cited a sobering meeting last month on the topic of solid waste. A speaker from Jacobs, the trash hauling company in The Villages, discussed the disappearing market for recycled products and predicted newspapers will no longer be recycled in many communities.
Bell, known for his love of technology, said it is time to bring Recreation News into the modern age, putting it online and installing touch screens with information readily available at recreation centers.
“Make it an online document. We could save a lot of tonnage,” Bell said.
Many in The Villages previously have decried the wastefulness of Recreation News, pointing to repetitive information printed over and over.
More than $800,000 in residents’ amenities fees will be spent next year on Recreation News.
The cost of Recreation News received no attention for many years, with many residents assuming the Daily Sun was picking up the tab. That was until 2017, when the AAC was hit with a 73 percent increase in the cost of Recreation News.
That news set off a torrent of complaints from residents who argued that Recreation News is largely redundant, killing trees and should be presented in an online, searchable format.
One year ago, AAC member Carl Bell asked Recreation Director John Rohan about progress in putting Recreation News into an easily accessible online format. Rohan called it, “A Herculean task.”
A pdf is available on the District’s website, but it is hard to locate and few Villagers are aware it exists.
Share your thoughts about Recreation News by submitting a Letter to the Editor at this link: https://www.villages-news.com/submit-letters-editor/
