A friend of the blog emails:
I had read a while back that some garbage collectors in Saint Paul were not meeting their obligation to customers and were not collecting trash. Mine was consistently being picked up, so I felt fortunate, especially since I was never a supporter of city wide trash collection, at least not the inefficient way Saint Paul was doing it.
With the heat, I had avoided a great deal of yard work during June, but towards the end of the month, I finally had enough yard waste to put out at the curb.
No collection.
I didn’t worry about it much. I just left it out for the next week.
Still no collection.
I finally contacted my hauler who told me they were contracting with another hauler to collect yard waste and to contact them. Ok. I would guess this wouldn’t be my job, but I did it anyway. That hauler told me they had never heard of me and that is why my yard waste wasn’t collected and they’d investigate more.
So, I reached out to my own hauler again. This time, they told me my yard waste wasn’t out by 7am on collection day. (It’s been out for two weeks.) But, they insisted that this other hauler was ultimately responsible.
I called the other hauler back. This time, I was told that actually, in my part of town, my own hauler is responsible for yard waste collection and that they aren’t contracted to collect yard waste for that part of town.
So, my head is spinning. Yard waste is not important to me. It will break down in the container. I’ll have more space and when they get it figured out, it will get collected one way or another. But, this is very poor practice. As we all know, if we let trash collection happen in a free market, as it should, then the original hauler would be cancelled and I would go with someone who could actually provide the service that I pay for. Since Saint Paul took this control from me, I sit here, with very little option.
The only satisfaction that I get—knowing that those whiny Marshall Avenue people who fought for this exact system are also getting the same poor service as me. And it’s only a slight bit of satisfaction because they’ll still support the same city council and mayor that allowed this to happen.
The only results they really care about are getting government to do exactly what they want
Well, I wonder if backlash on things like this motivated worthless commie Dai Thao to resign?! Wait! No. That can’t be the reason.
This really rich! He’s leaving to take a position as Executive Director of a faith based, social justice organization in Florida. I’m betting an apple fritter that he’s back in less than a year, as an utter failure.
Somehow Joe’s story reminds me of visiting East Berlin before the Wall fell. When government is responsible, it simply does not get done.
One of my biggest complaints about moving to North Saint Paul 10 years ago was the city contract for trash collection. A couple of years ago the City decided to hire a different service, and things have seemed to go pretty much the same as the last service. Generally it all works out, but I’ve had some days with similar issues. Garbage doesn’t get picked up, and I end up being the one that has to call the City, and the Hauler, then the City, and the Hauler again, rinse, repeat, etc. “Garbage as to be out before 7am and yours wasn’t.” Hmm, that’s funny, mine’s been out for days in violation of city code and I’m currently waiting for the Fire Chief to come give me a ticket. What’s your next excuse?
All in all, even with a City Contract, I’ve found the best way to get better service is to take to Twitter and tag the Hauler with a complaining tweet. It usually gets a response with a different contact number within 20 minutes.
They were told things like this were going to happen and they voted for it anyways.
Robbinsdale is experiencing this exact problem with Waste Management (the city’s only contracted hauler). I just love reading all the posts complaining about no yard waste pickup on the Birdtown FB page. It has gotten so bad that Robbinsdale had to open an impromptu waste disposal site. This led to a number of people complaining that they are paying for collection but still have to dispose of their own waste by putting the massively stinky stuff in their own personal vehicles. I have frequently commented that Crystal (which doesn’t have a contracted hauler, but instead has 7 approved haulers) doesn’t have this problem. Our haulers know that if they give poor service, their customers will switch haulers. And how St Paul and Bloomington are experiencing the exact same issues since they switched to a single municipal contracted hauler.
I doubt enough Robbinsdale citizens will get pissed off enough to put a motion on the ballot to undo the municipal hauler contract.