The Henderson City Council went into its budget meetings this past week asking department heads to present their needs and looking between the lines for ways to save money and boost the anemic fund balance.
Out of the dozen presentations, exactly one department head offered suggestions to save real money. And council members responded with nothing but criticism.
Public Works Director James Morgan deserves praise, not scorn, just for having the courage to touch the third rail of Henderson politics, backyard garbage pickup, and to raise practical questions about the emotional issue of recycling. The ideas themselves also have enough merit to deserve serious council consideration.
We’ll deal with recycling, which is wrapped up in philosophy and morality as well as money, another day. But we think Morgan’s proposal for garbage pickup is too important to wait.
We hope you’re sitting down for this: Morgan wants to halt the sacrosanct practice of collecting people’s garbage at their back doors twice a week. Instead, he wants to pick up the garbage at the side of the street once a week.
OK, stay calm. Take deep, soothing breaths. If you’re fool enough to smoke and feel the need for a cigarette to calm your nerves, go ahead. We’ll be here when you get back.
Now that you’ve handled the initial shock, why don’t we examine the details of Morgan’s proposal?
Morgan wants the city to give every home in Henderson a 90-gallon rolling garbage bin. Once a week, residents would be expected to roll the bins from the back of their houses to the side of street. Sanitation workers would roll the bins the remaining few feet to the end of the garbage truck, which already is equipped to lift and dump the container.
The positives of the plan are numerous.
For the hardworking sanitation workers, they no longer would have to wander over hill and dale to roll garbage bins into back yards, never knowing what they’ll find there — an empty trash can, a mountain of garbage bags, a dog or two prowling through and fouling the grounds. They no longer would have to handle the garbage, saving them from glass or other sharp objects poking through the plastic. They wouldn’t have to risk back injuries lifting bags of uncertain weight.
For city residents, they would no longer have people wandering into their back yards a couple of days a week. They would no longer have to worry about something stored in the back mistakenly making its way into a landfill. They would have to remember to put the trash out only once a week.
For the city, the benefits include fewer worker’s compensation claims and more time for Morgan’s staff to work on potholes, street cleaning and the endless other tasks confronting the Department of Public Works.
And for all of us, there’s the bottom line: hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.
Because the garbage trucks would roll down each street only once a week and would be able to cover routes much more quickly, Morgan wouldn’t need as large a staff. Based on the experiences of other cities that have entered the 21st century and switched to curbside garbage collection, Morgan said he should be able to run four garbage trucks instead of six, eliminating the need for six sanitation jobs. He would use attrition instead of layoffs to cut those jobs (there’s always something for his staff to do).
Eliminating six sanitation jobs would save the city at least $150,000 a year in wages and benefits. The bottom-line advantage in future years would be even greater because the city would be spared pay raises and higher benefit costs for those jobs.
Speaking of staff benefits, the city’s worker’s compensation costs should drop dramatically as sanitation employees are spared the dangers of handling and lifting garbage and are able to spend far less time in any one spot on the streets, where impatient drivers create a real peril to the workers.
Garbage trucks cost $100,000 or so. Morgan is asking for a new one in the coming fiscal year. Running four trucks instead of six means dropping another $100,000 on a new truck far less often.
All told, the annual cash savings to the city should top $200,000 (and rising) under Morgan’s plan. The savings wouldn’t be immediate — unless there’s a garbage can grant program, the 90-gallon bins would cost the city about $450,000, and the staff savings would have to wait unless the City Council developed a ruthless streak and ordered layoffs instead of attrition. But the savings would keep piling up forever.
As Morgan said in an interview Thursday, this plan is a no-brainer.
But that’s not the way the council received it, so let’s deal with the criticisms (paraphrased):
* “We have lots of old people who couldn’t get their trash to the side of the street.” We’ll let the AARP handle complaints about this stereotyping of the elderly, expressed in similar terms by Mike Rainey on Thursday night. But we reject the image of Henderson as a city of old-age invalids.
Morgan said only 19 of the 5,300 homes his crews serve have asked for help getting their recycling to the curb; even if pushing a garbage bin is harder than carrying a recycling bin, we don’t believe curbside pickup would be a hardship for more than a few hundred Hendersonians. We’d hope most of them could count on neighbors, motivated by friendliness if not the massive city savings, to roll the garbage to the road. And we know Morgan will make arrangements for those who need help; sending his staff around back at a handful of homes wouldn’t wipe out the benefits of more than 5,000 homes shifting to curbside pickup.
Longtime local commentator Whit Sutton described how the proposed garbage system works in practice in his new home, Emerald Isle: “The program works beautifully, and the trash collection procedure is much more efficient. … And believe me, there are a whole lot more retired senior citizens here than in Henderson, and they seem to manage just fine.”
* “All of those garbage cans will make streets impassable.” A series of questions from Elissa Yount showed that is a concern of hers, particularly in the narrow, winding streets of Flint Hill and other old parts of town.
We trust Morgan to know what will and won’t work on the streets he maintains. And the garbage bins don’t have to be on the streets, just beside them. Even if the bins wind up on a few narrow streets, we believe there will be room for cars and trucks to get through with a little patience.
* “If you thought the city was messy now, wait until you make people move their trash farther than the back door.” John Wester didn’t show much faith in his fellow Hendersonians when he delivered such a sentiment Thursday. We tend to think that when it comes to real garbage, few people will let laziness overcome the stench and the unsanitary conditions of piling up the mess in the house or the back yard.
But let’s say Wester is right, and hundreds of residents decide to turn their back yards into private landfills. Then it’s time to put the Code Compliance Department to work. Corey Williams, the director of that department, estimates that $8,000 will be sufficient to pay contractors to clean up and maintain 100 trashed and/or overgrown lots in the next fiscal year. If we have to spend $20,000 to clear garbage from 250 yards in a year, that’s only 10 percent of the minimum amount we ought to save from the new garbage system.
All of that money is charged to the homeowners, so the city should get it back. Plus, with the new system of civil penalties, the city can hit the property owners with ever-increasing fines that should result in a nice financial payoff, a powerful incentive for change or, we hope, both. After all, the City Council endorsed civil penalties for the very purpose of forcing an attitude adjustment on Hendersonians.
* “Folks will leave the 90-gallon bins lying around the streets and their front yards all week.” Mayor Clem Seifert presented this worry during a chat Friday. And again we find ourselves pointing to civil penalties.
The council would need to pass an ordinance specifying when the bins could be rolled out and when they had to be brought in. People who repeatedly ignored the rules would be subject to fines. Eventually, they would get the message, or they would write the city sizable checks.
If you’re still dubious about the benefits of once-a-week, curbside garbage collection, we have an easy number to comprehend: $10.
That’s the amount Morgan estimates the city could cut from the monthly sanitation charge once all the savings from the change are in effect. Aren’t you willing to roll a garbage bin a few dozen feet a week to keep $120 a year in your own pocket instead of the city coffers?