It's good news for the entire community that the municipality's leaf and yard waste collection site is open once again.

We're concerned that the new limited hours (Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., precisely when most people are at work) will defeat the whole point of having the site. Most people do their yard work at night or on the weekend.

We do question why the site had to be shut down in the first place. For us, this is just another example of overzealous provincial bureaucrats rushing into a situation and creating a crisis where none existed.

The municipality received no notice and no consultation about the orders that shut down the site.

Was a simple phone call or visit to the municipal office that tough on Ministry staffers? A quick call to our municipal office would have revealed that the site upgrades the Ministry wants were on the agenda to be dealt with at last week's budget meetings.

Perhaps our council needs to write a letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty about this entire episode.

McGuinty wants to be known as an environmentally-friendly premier and yet, here we have provincial bureaucrats capriciously shutting down a compost collection site with no warning.

An important environmentally-friendly service was denied to the residents of this municipality on the whim of a provincial agency. Perhaps the Premier should know about this.

Even now, with the site re-opened the province has arbitrarily reduced the service level. The hours have changed and now our residents are inconvenienced.

And what was the purpose of all this? Essentially nothing has changed.