Update/ Correction/Retraction on earlier post: Georgetown Garbage Collection Fiasco

I spoke with Georgetown City Council members and Mayor Karen Tingle-Sames this week and learned that the blog I posted on Georgetown garbage collection was based on less than accurate information. Some of this information came from residents while other parts came from garbage collectors themselves. And as anyone knows, front porch and workplace gossip only points in the direction of truth; it rarely points to the truth, and one can get lost along the way. Unfortunately, I jumped to conclusions and wrote as though the information I used was fact, without doing the work necessary for confirmation.

All of this comes from discussions and observations not properly vetted. The issue of reducing the crew size was a matter of discussion and was tried on a limited basis, but the pilot was not implemented according to plan, which resulted in the observed collection delays. For overstating the case, I owe apologies to the Georgetown Council and Mayor as well as the city government.

There are many ideas being floated about in an attempt to balance the budget of Georgetown. In my discussions with council members and the mayor, I learned that much of what I presented herein was in consideration, although some items mentioned had not been. Overall, Georgetown has a plan, and that plan is being assessed and adjusted as the process unfolds. The plan, as I received it from the mayor, involves upgrading all workers to drivers, with rotating responsibilities and commensurate pay increases. The plan includes a reassessment of routes to maximize efficiency and reduce fuel consumption and the acquisition of new and improvement of current equipment. The plan is designed to reduce operating costs while permitting for an expected January 2008 curbside recycling startup. The recycling plan is still in development, although its initial costs have already been introduced in garbage service billing.

Although there is much work yet to be done, the situation with Georgetown garbage collection is nowhere near as dire as I had claimed in the original post, which I have included below.

Georgetown Garbage Collection Fiasco

Georgetown cut city garbage collection truck crews by a third, eliminating one of two men per truck who actually picked up garbage from the curb. The effect was to cut the workforce, in terms of amount of physical labor to remove garbage from curb to truck, in half. The driver doesn’t determine how long a route takes; the men on the ground do. The new labor arrangement has caused fully predictable delays in the garbage pick up for many, if not all, residents of Georgetown. Due to the delays, it has been reported that garbage crews were threatened with replacement by private companies if the current crews could not keep up with the schedule.

The cutting of the garbage crews has been blamed upon the necessity to cut costs and save taxpayer dollars. If this labor reduction is meant to offset the rising costs of fuel for the city, it is entirely wrongheaded and shows a lack of fiscal understanding on the part of the city. If the issue is fuel costs, it seems a more reasonable and responsible approach would be to cut fuel consumption rather than labor. By cutting labor, the city has forced the collection process to slow, raising fuel consumption by effectively doubling the amount of time trucks are on the road. The net effect of this will be reflected in increased fuel costs for garbage collection. A saner approach would have been to consolidate routes so that there is less travel in fewer trips from garage to routes. Putting five days’ routes into four days would have increased the daily travel and work load by 25% while reducing engine running time at idle. This would have saved on fuel without hurting the garbage collectors and the fuel expenses. Then again, if the city really wanted to save labor costs in its garbage collection, why not, as has been done successfully in other communities, use the labor of inmates in the county jail?

The threat to privatize brings up interesting points. Why would the city adopt a cost saving plan that hurts employees and reduces service to residents without having positive impact on the true culprit, fuel costs? Why would the city not directly address the real issue by consolidating routes to reduce non-essential travel and idle time? Why would the city, having doubled the garbage collectors’ labor requirement, threaten them with privatization when they expectably fail to maintain the original schedule?

Privatization will not save money for the residents. The only way it can save money for the city is if the private company handles billing itself and gives the city a royalty or permit fee. If this is the case, and it usually is when municipal waste management is privatized, then residents’ bills will go up while the city can plausibly deny responsibility and still collect “fees”. All of this is an apparent effort by the city government to dupe its residents into paying more for services and being able to claim deniability.

All of this taken into account, it seems that perhaps the city government has set about creating the circumstances that will "force" privatization. As the city's decisions stand now, the city has made it nigh on impossible for acceptable garbage collection service to take place barring the introduction of a private company. The questions then turn to, who in the city government has interests with private waste management or who stands to profit from this arrangement through some unethical, if not outright illegal, kickback scheme? Then again, it seems that the money has been already paid or promised. The interest of the city government is supposed to be the city and its residents; the actions taken and threatened thus far in Georgetown address neither. Therefore, the city government of Georgetown, KY is either incredibly inept or.., well I’ll leave the reader to fill in that blank.