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Civic participation is crucial to America's form of government, whether in Congress or town halls, especially during an election.

A good example is a recent forum held by Waste Not Frederick and Our CommonWealth for candidates running for mayor and aldermen in the City of Frederick.

Both organizations oppose the incinerator that the Frederick Board of County Commissioners intends to build with Carroll County. The groups wanted to know if city candidates support or oppose the incinerator, or what some people call a "waste-to-energy facility" because it burns trash to generate electricity.

The city takes it trash to the county's landfill, so it stands to reason it would take its trash to a county incinerator if it is built.

And since the city is the county's largest municipality, the groups figure that the county — which has approved the incinerator and is in working with a vendor to design and permit it — would be hard-pressed to build an incinerator if the city decided to take its trash elsewhere.

But the county is not relying on city trash to build the incinerator, according to Mike Marschner, director of Frederick County's division of Utilities and Solid Waste Management. The county will build it with or without the city.

County and city officials even told Gazette reporter Erica L. Green last week that a decision not to use the county's incinerator would be costly and next to impossible.

Some kind of trash management discussion belongs at a city forum, but the incinerator should not dominate or smother other more immediate, city-specific topics, such as the tightening budget, crime, the direction historic preservation should take, annexations, etc.

Sooner or later, the mayor and aldermen will have to wrestle with trash — building their own landfill or transfer station, which would be costly — and voters ought to know how they would solve the problem and whether they want to continue to "buy" the service from the county.

Elected city officials should even seek ways to recycle as much as it can and throw away as little as possible, if only to keep down costs.

But voters should realize that city officials will have no real sway on the county's plan to build an incinerator. They might be able to exert subtle political pressure or serve to rally people to oppose the incinerator. The question voters will have to decide is if that is enough.