The devil did not make them do it

Every time I see the likes of this, I suspect belligerence or carelessness on the part of League City's trash contractor Republic Waste, or mischief at the hands of neighborhood children:

Oh, come on - for the umpteenth time, empty trash cans in the very middle of the street?!

But of course, that's why I have a series of security cameras, so that I can get to the bottom of stuff like this.  Rewinding time, I have found no instance where any human hand was to blame for this repeated minor annoyance.  It was just the wind.

During the trash can investigation process, I did discover that someone in the neighborhood has a new kitty.  All black and given the size, I suspect female.  Let's hope she does her part to keep the local rodent population in check.  

Something stinky, Part 4: Warm crap in a bag

I don't get credit for that provocative tag line - Houstonia does.

If you don't read Houstonia, you should - it's awesome.  It's like a local Texas Monthly except it doesn't take itself quite as seriously and it sets the journalistic creativity bar much higher, particularly with respect to humor and the kind of Gestaltic insight that can only derive from a passionate sense of place. 

Screengrabbed from one of their Facebook entries of this morning; referenced story here. 

I'm borrowing the phrase for use as a tag line because last night saw me carrying that very substance (much more than Avogadro's quantity of it) for a longer distance than I would have preferred.  Except mine wasn't the much-maligned Frito pie - it really was warm crap in a bag. 

This kind of bag.  Leak proof, thank God. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

See, I like to go jogging on either Sunday or Wednesday evening because that's when I am guaranteed to find at least a few trash cans set by the curb for pick-up the next day.  Therefore when my furry jogging companion makes her inevitable solid waste deposit, I can bag it and promptly slip it into someone else's can without having to carry the warm, mushy thing a full mile back to my own house. 

But here's the problem with Wednesday night jogs:  As I've noted previously, League City's trash contract is very inefficient and not many people bother to put their trash cans out, because we really don't need two trash collection days per week and Thursday is perceived as our "second" trash day and therefore that's the one most people ignore. 

I don't know how those poor buggers on the corner of Elm Pointe and Heather Pointe feel about having been designated the primary dog dumping ground in Centerpointe, but their side yard is scent central.  Many dogs, including mine, will intentionally hold in their goods for the chance to deposit them at this common canine marking ground.  If you guys see dog poo remaining on your property, it's from someone else's dog, not mine - I pick up hers every time. 

And after I pick it up, I carry it to the nearest trash can.  The while line shown on the screengrab above traces the distance from the point of deposit to the nearest available can last night. 

I had to jog eleven hundred feet past two dozen houses last night before I found a trash can set out for collection.  That's how few cans were set out in that area of the subdivision for this week's second collection event. 

As of this morning, the situation was slightly improved, at least in Section 9, where 37% of residents had set out their cans (they tend to be younger and more enthusiastically ritualized here, given our section's recent genesis).  But of course, as has historically been the case, most of those cans were holding just a single small kitchen bag of trash.  If we'd wanted to, we probably could have consolidated the entire section's 75 homes worth of trash into about five of the 96-gallon rolling bins. 

But take heart: there's now only four more years to go on League City's current waste management contract.


I'd like to dedicate this post to the fine folks in Republic Waste's corporate headquarters, the folks who have been following my commentary regarding the League City trash agreement, which some of us have interpreted to represent warm crap in a contract for reasons I will not recapitulate here but which can be found under the Trash label in this blog. 
:-)

Something stinky, Part 3: The loony bin

What is this a picture of?  And don't say "A lawn that needs to be edged" because I already know that much.

HINT:  Recall the old children's teaser where someone would hold up a blank piece of paper and ask,
"What is this a picture of?" 
And the viewer would reply, "Nothing."
"No, it's actually a picture of a cow eating grass."
"But where is the grass?"
"The cow ate it."
"And where is the cow?"
"Well, no use hanging around if all the grass is gone, so the cow left."

This is actually a picture of where my kitchen recycle bin should have been found following this week's recycle pick-up. 

"But where is your empty bin?"

"The trash crew recycled it." 

*Sigh*.  The blue bins are too large to fit on the floor of my kitchen pantry (which is really just a tiny closet).  Therefore, I purchased a separate smaller plastic bin which exactly fit the available space.  If I have a large quantity of recyclables, I put them out in my custom-designed rolly bin.  But if I just have a few items to recycle, I sometimes just place the smaller kitchen bin at the curb for emptying.

But as I explained in this post back in March, the Republic Waste crews seem to spend their time inventing brand new ways of p*ssing us off.  I should have known that they would have taken a perfectly functional clean plastic collection bin and simply tossed it into the truck along with its contents.  Because, after all, returning that bin to the curb might have involved them taking one or two extra steps, actually lifting one foot and placing it in front of the other, all that.  Easier just to dispose of a perfectly good homeowner's bin.

But now there's a new tactical development in the League City War On Trash, and I'm not really sure that I like it.  Let me talk about that next.

On August 31, there was a neighborhood email blast which described how Centerpointe might be chosen for a pilot study testing automated trash pick-up. 

This is the kind of scheme that I believe the City is talking about.  There's a lift arm on the truck which grabs and empties the cart.   

It sounds good in theory, but it's quite likely to be similar to what I lived with during my seven years as a City of Houston homeowner, which wasn't so great in practice.  The main issue is that the bins distributed under these types of schemes are almost always the 96-gallon varieties, which are way, way too large for our purposes...

...because most homeowners put out a twice-weekly amount of trash roughly comparable to this miniscule amount.  Why would you need a 96-gallon bin for a 7-gallon disposal event?

Photo from this post in which I began describing what I perceive as significant waste (pun intended) and inefficiency in the new League City trash contract.

A 96-gallon trash can is designed for five or more people - under a WEEKLY pick-up scheme.  So for those of us who have extremely wasteful twice-per-week pick-up, that 96-gallon can would be expected to accommodate the needs of ten people.  How many Centerpointe households contain ten people?!

Screengrabbed from this site. 

In a March post called "Trash Transformation", I had already described how I had downsized my own original 96-gallon trash rolly bin because the danged thing is just too large.

That's my original 96-gallon grey one on the left, and my twenty dollar replacement can on the right.  I proceeded to use the older 96-gallon can for mulch storage. 

Trash can size turns out to be surprisingly important in Centerpointe for a number of reasons:

1. Many of us have such tiny back yards that we literally have trouble storing one, let alone two large cans without having them getting in the way of something else.  In the photo above, you see my 96-gallon can and my DIY-recycle rolly side by side on the concrete pad we have behind our garage.  The recycle rolly is intentionally smaller because I literally cannot store two 96-gallon cans side by side here.  There's no room.  The 96-gallon is right up against the door frame, because it has to be. 
2. Many of us have only five-foot building setbacks.  My 96-gallon trash can is just a hair under three feet thick.  Do the math on this one: it is a genuine pain in the a** to wrangle a three-foot can through a five-foot side yard.  Especially because...
3. ... our side yards have been strongly sloped to achieve the necessary lot drainage in such a narrow corridor.  Therefore, when a person is trying to wrestle a large can either into our out of our side yards, the tip-over rate is close to 100%.  This is extremely frustrating and my husband has been forced to listen to no small quantity of bitching and moaning from me about how we need to fix it, but the solutions we've come up with are neither easy nor cheap (we can't just put a concrete walkway because both of our miserable five-foot side yards are encumbered by buried utilities). 

In sum, if you have ever wondered why so many Centerpointers do this...

One tiny bag set out sans trash can.

...now you have your answer:  Because those homeowners would end up in the loony (trash) bin if they spent their time fighting space bottlenecks to get large cans back and forth between the curb and their side yards. 

So here's my prediction if we go to automated collection involving dual 96-gallon trash and recycling cans: 

You're going to see a lot more cans left in front of peoples' houses where our ordinances prohibit them from remaining.  What's going to happen is that people are going to roll their empty cans up the driveway as far as their garage, but then they'll say to themselves, "Ugh, moving this massive thing is such a hassle and the mosquitoes are horrible right now, so I'll do the rest later."  But then "later" never happens and the cans continue to sit out in front of the house (she said, as one of the guilty homeowners who speaks from abundant personal experience). 

There is a potential workaround for this predicament:

The 50% of you Centerpointe folks who prefer the no-can-wrangling hassle-free method of simply depositing your plastic bags at the curb?  Ask your neighbor if you can simply add your bags to their can.  Trade off with your neighbor on which one of you will put out a trash can and which will put out a recycle cart, such that you can reciprocally add to each others' cans while cutting your respective work loads in half. 

Of course, that strategy would necessitate you actually talking with your neighbor, which might be traumatic for folks with fixed ideas about what life in suburbia is supposed to consist of, but trust me - it's a fully-survivable experience.  You might even (gulp) enjoy it. 

If we end up with the 96-gallon carts, hell, probably every five neighbors could collaborate and cut their cumulative work load even further, there's so much excess capacity in those things. 

But whatever choice you make, don't opt to put your own small recycle bin by the curb, because it will surely disappear.

Here's that famous portrait of the cow eating grass.  A veritable masterpiece, wouldn't you agree? 

Annual POA meeting, Part 2: New trash vendor complaints

Following up on this introductory post, I'm going to re-cap more of the content from the other night's POA meeting.  Recall as I said previously that this blog does not represent the positions of Centerpointe POA.  I'm an independent blogger who lives in the subdivision. 

Numerous residents voiced opinions about the new trash vendor recently contracted by League City.  Those opinions included, but were not necessarily limited to, the following:

(1) The workers were alleged to be sloppy.  One woman complained about her trash can being left a considerable distance out in the roadway instead of right at the curb, at the foot of the driveway, or in the hell strip. 

Is it too much to ask for that the cans and recycle boxes be placed neatly in an upright position instead of being scattered about?  It's bad enough that we now have to look at the containers three days a week instead of two, as was the case previously.  Can we not at least minimize the trashy appearance? 

Your blogger (who self-identified during the meeting, by the way) voiced the opinion that the workers do not always pick up stray pieces of trash that get loose during the loading process.  I had previously snapped a few pics to illustrate this point, but hadn't gotten around to publishing them, so here they are now. 

Yum!!  This sub-headline reads:
TV Dinner Makes Encore Appearance on Front Lawn.

One of my neighbors likes snacking on Pringles, apparently.  You have no secrets here - wwwwah hah hah hah hah!!

This kind of general neatness may seem like a minor thing, but here's what happens.  My dog, like all proud members of her species, passionately believes in eating first and asking questions later.  So if she comes across a nice stinky piece of plastic trash on the ground, she will gobble it up gleefully and without a second thought. 

And then the next thing I'll see is her scraping her anus across the ground, and I'm wondering if she'll be able to pass that piece of plastic, or will I need to incur a very large veterinarian bill to get it dealt with. 

(2)  The trucks were observed to come at unpredictable times, sometimes very late in the day.  Several attendees made this observation and noted that they missed having Ameriwaste pick up trash early in the day so that it is promptly over and done with.  They noted that Ameriwaste was very consistent in this regard. 

Having attended one of the trash-related City Council meetings, I remember clearly that one of Republic Waste's service superiority arguments was that they would not do collection on Saturdays (as Ameriwaste did) because of the safety factor with children expected to be outside at that time.  Well, guess what??  I've instead seen the trucks in Section 9 when the elementary school bus is off-loading in the afternoon.  So we've gone from having trash trucks cruising around when children might be outside to having them cruise around when young children are guaranteed to be outside.  Fabulouso. 

(3) The vendor was alleged to be noncommunicative and unhelpful, with service plans not specified.  One man questioned whether they would issue their own trash cans, the kind suitable for use with the automatic dumpers.  He wanted to know the answer because he wasn't sure whether he should invest in a new can for himself. 

When I published this post a few days ago, I was assuming that these kinds of cans would not be issued - because nothing that I know of has been said to that effect.

But another man noted that he had seen the vendor using automated trucks and vendor-issued cans in another subdivision - if memory serves me, I think he cited Countryside. 

I haven't confirmed any of this, but it's a good question: are we going to be issued cans?  Have other subdivisions been issued cans?  If so, how were those decisions made as to who got cans and who did not? 

(4) Alleged intentional non-collection.  One man described chasing down a trash crew after they failed to dispose of all of his trash.  Reportedly, the crew then explained to him that there were some items which they had been instructed not to pick up from homeowners.  It was noted that no such conflicts were known to have occurred with Ameriwaste. 

Given the chorus of complaints expressed in that meeting, the POA stated that they intend to take up these vendor issues with League City directly, so stay tuned for further developments. 

Trash transformation

After all I said a few months ago about the League City trash contract, let me post-script with this next bit. 

Here is the bottom line of what I suspect.  I have no proof of any of this, but having watched in detail as several of the City Council sessions unfolded, having observed the resulting choreography (especially the unspoken foot moves) surrounding that entire transaction, this is what my common-sense brain suspects:

I suspect League City got suckered on that contract.  The video footage makes it appear that City Council was presented with a seemingly-great rate structure, if only they signed the contract quickly.  Then upon realizing their error, they were stuck in an irreversible situation because the contract was trip-wired with too many legal hazards to make backing out of it a financially-supportable decision. 

I suspect that they fell for the classic "limited time offer" sales job, which the contractor leveed to his advantage.  Here is an example website explaining how to rig the headspace of such a ploy.  Quoth, "Psychologists and sales people know that if you give people a yes or no decision to make, it’s more likely to turn out in your favor if it’s made quickly." 

Here's another explanation of this classic sales manoeuvre.  And another.  And another. 

This is a Microsoft clip art that I retrieved using the key word "sales".  It's apparently intended to illustrate that our happy salesman is approaching Cloud 9 because his sales are going so well - he's riding a wave of sales successes to the stratosphere.  Yippee!!! 

But if you ponder this seemingly-innocent image, it could be construed to be incorporating another facet to its message, could it not?  I get the sense that more than this man's sales numbers might be trending upward.  Something else might be trending upward, perhaps with a hint of Peyronie's disease, and his customers might be due for one hell of an over-sized screwing as a result.

I have no proof of any of that stuff I said above and it's just my personal opinion, but here is the take-away: 

• Is City Council going to take a similar tact five years from now when the contract is re-upped? 
• Or will there be anyone left at the helm with any institutional knowledge of how it went down this time around?  Will they know to be on guard the next time? 
• Will City Council be able to see through the veil of common sales ploys that will likely manifest, and will they be able to apply the level of sophistication to their decision that an eight-figure contract (!!) rightfully demands?

You can bet yourself one thing.  You can bet that, if I'm still around in five years, they'll all be hearing from me pro-actively, before the contracting process even begins.  I've already Outlook'd the next trash contract renewal dates.  Yes.  I am that much of a nerd.  I have indeed Outlook'd the next League City trash contract five years ahead of time.  And the very first thing I'll be sending to Council is a link to this blog post, if I'm still around. 

OK, having spouted all that personal opinion, I thought I'd now address the derivations of my done-deal trash contract acceptance headspace. 

This particular image from our recent SusFest visit stuck with me:

Trash carts re-interpreted by high school students and entered into a City of Houston competition. 

This got me to thinking:  what else might be achieved using the average trash rolly cart?  What other uses might it be good for?  Because under League City's new contract, I certainly don't need anything remotely resembling our existing behemoth trash cart, which was originally designed for use with automated collection systems.

It's very robust, heavy, and was designed to withstand one of these gripper machines, which we certainly don't have.
Screengrabbed from this site. 

And frankly, I'm more than sick of dragging the heavy, awkward thing from our microscopic back yard, through our microscopic gate, across our microscopic side yard, and to the curb.  And I don't need anything remotely that size, especially with the bothersome twice-per-week collection scheme now being guaranteed for another five years. 

But I didn't want to get rid of it entirely.  I might need a larger can at some future point.  So what to do with it in the meantime? 

Then it hit me like a ton of mulch.

Literally, a ton of mulch.  It's that time of year - time to mulch the beds and replenish the gardens with fresh soil.  That's mulch on the left, and less-than-ideal soil on the right.  

I have always, always wanted a place to store a bit of mulch in reserve, for those minor landscaping repairs and augmentations that are needed throughout the year.  But because our yard is so incredibly microscopic, I can't leave a pile of it anywhere on the ground.  There isn't room for that. 

But I can store it in a 96-gallon trash rolly which (according to its lid) is rated for a 350 pound load.  And I can roll it around to wherever in the yard it needs to be spotted when I'm taking material out of it. 

This may sound a little over-cautious, but having never stored mulch in a rolly cart before, I wondered about the heat entrapment potential.  Mulch does give off decompositional heat when stored in large quantities, but internet sources such as this one don't suggest that such a small volume could pose a combustion risk.  Fires seem to occur in cases where an ignition source is introduced from the outside, or where composters have intentionally used accelerants, as was reportedly the recent case at an Austin-area municipal facility. 

However, in rare cases, conspiracies of circumstances have been reported to set fire to mulch that has already been spread on the ground, and there is debate about spontaneous combustion potential (but mostly for very large piles that build up their own internal heat).  I'll be keeping my rolly mulch wetted down just to be on the safe side. 

And for the next five years, I'll be managing household trash in a much smaller rolly that is far easier to move around. 

About one-third the volume of its grey big brother on the left.  Approximately twenty bucks at Lowes. 

Of trash and trees

I know you're sick of this topic, but the points I'm making are important, and if you suffer through this intro, I've got a brand new piece of perspective to follow in this post - I promise.

First of all, I wanted to launch off Heber Taylor's morning editorial in GCDN in which he essentially encouraged League City to get off its collective duff and resolve two outstanding issues before the end of the year, one of which is the trash contract. 

I second that notion, but I qualify it thusly:  Resolve it but don't rush it, because it's important - it's a lot of money.  To put that money in perspective, the trash contract as it currently stands is within about 10% of the cost of the new Public Safety Building which I believe the Mayor recently cited as THE single biggest infrastructure investment that League City has ever made in its history (I'm too pressed for time to track down the URL and with GCDN going behind the paywall in a few days, I'm not sure it the link would remain live anyway). 

To re-emphasize my position on that contract, I've got a few more polyethylene poster children to show you this morning.  Today is the second weekly collection day for my informal "study area", and just in case you thought the previous measured participation rate of 56% was an abberation, what my dog and I measured this morning was an even 60% participation rate (n = 75 homes, normalized for 73 occupancies; 44 participants). 

I even put my own trash out even though it didn't need to go out, just to ensure that I wouldn't be skewing the results even a little bit. 

This is noteworthy because we are currently in the most trash-intensive period of the year.  People are shopping like mad and cleaning their houses in preparation for the holidays.  Packages are getting delivered.  Junk mail is arriving in successive vomitous waves. 

And yet once again, this is a lot of what's out there:

I wanted to ensure that all trash bag ethnicities were equally represented. 

 

If you squashed down those Mickey D's boxes, it might amount to one cubic foot.

There's an Andy Warhol moment in there somewhere. 

Tiny bags of almost nothingness.  If Ameriwaste had failed to materialize this morning, fire ants could have carried this off wholesale. 

OK, now for a little additional perspective on all this.

I made an error in a recent blog post and one of League City's fine employees pointed this out to me.  When I announced that League City had finally gotten around to maintaining the trees around the municipal complex, I was viewing those trees while stopped at the intersection of SH-3 and West Walker WB.  From that angle, it did indeed look like work had been done on the trees.  But city arborist Heather McKnight clarified it for me thusly in an email:

"Our goal is to have all of the oaks surrounding the municipal complex looking good; however, right now we just trimmed the trees near the library for traffic signal visibility and safety. We hope to expand our tree trimming program in the future."

Upon closer examination from a different angle, I could see that she was correct:

They are still a tangled nasty mess of suckers and deadwood, but have, indeed, been hacked back off the adjacent utilities.  Looking north from EB West Walker at SH-3, library in the background. 

This represents a major missed opportunity, as I will explain. 

Here's what this has to do with trash:  It speaks to bang-for-buck and creative leverage of tax dollars.  Most of the trees surrounding the muni complex currently look like crap.  They aren't being properly maintained.  Trimming a tree is analogous to giving a room a new paint job - it's a tiny investment that can make a major, disproportionate positive impact on the resulting esthetics and perception of value. 

Well all know that the greater Houston area is not known for its natural beauty.  For the most part, it's flat and featureless.  But it does have some features that can be easily played to significant advantage, and live oaks are one of them. 

This is what properly-maintained live oaks look like - compare with the library tree picture above.  People go out of their way to take a tour around Rice University and surrounding neighborhoods to view these spectacular trees. As Houston Chronicle said a few years ago,
"Quality of life is worth occasional pruning."
Pic screengrabbed from this Rice site.

Suspected translation on "hope to expand our tree trimming in the future" = they don't have the budget for it.  Otherwise, it would have been done long before now; it's such an obvious maintenance task. 

And the obvious rebuttal to where I'm headed with this would be, "You can't take dollars saved on a trash contract and apply them to city beautification". 

Well, maybe not directly and immediately, dime for dime, without first making provisions for the re-application of those funds or their equivalent.  But you can work toward that type of financial turnaround and you can certainly run a ship more tightly than what is being cumulatively represented here. 

We're willing to waste taxpayers' money on (and in fact, increase the amount we pay for) an over-provision of trash services that we arguably don't use and don't need, and yet at the same time, we can't manage to accomplish the most basic maintenance for some of the very assets that define League City as a city.  I think there's something fundamentally and terribly wrong with that, and I look forward to the day when we get someone in a position of municipal authority who can bring to bear enough creativity to improve upon the likes of it.

Once-per-week trash option now on public radar

First, for the benefit of those viewers just tuning in, I will summarize this blog's coverage to date of the $30 million League City trash contract that was recently approved by City Council. 

Following that, I will summarize new developments including the cost increases that are now expected to impact League City's approximately 26,000 households (the election is now over - can you tell??).

You might want to skip these review bullets if you've already read this stuff:

• On October 28, 2012, I asked the following question: Why do League City residents pay for twice-weekly trash pick-up when our neighboring two million Houstonians only pay for one?
• On November 4, 2012, I presented my own limited but telling data in which I had measured a mere 56% trash participation rate in my study area's second weekly collection day (i.e., on November 3), but even more strikingly, I presented photos documenting the fact that many of those people who did bother to participate put out almost no trash.  By my own conservative fiscal viewpoint, I asserted that such little bags of almost-nothingness could easily have waited another three days for pickup without any deleterious impacts to public health or quality of life.
• On November 6, 2012, I described how I'd measured just a 43% recycling participation rate in my study area (also on November 3).  And, of course, Leaguers are using those tiny little recycle bins that hardly hold anything to start with.  I questioned the financial efficiency of this strategy.  Recycling is about conservation and yet it wouldn't surprise me if we were actually expending far more resources in fuel alone than we could ever hope to recoup through such a dismally-ineffective process that couples low participation with inefficient containerization.
• On November 9, 2012, I wrote an open letter on the contract following my participation in the first public meeting held by City Council.
• On November 11, 2012, I used general data published by the federal government to conservatively estimate how much League City taxpayers could save by going to a once-per-week collection scheme, concluding that the savings should be at least $4.5 million according to those published figures.

At one point in November 2012, in a discussion thread in a Galveston County Daily News article, I also made the observation that our newly-elected City Council members Bentley, Thiess, and Kinsey (I've used campaign URLs there in case they are still monitoring their own linkbacks) basically have no choice but to examine this trash contract very closely. 

If they don't do this, they're leaving themselves open to a serious spanking down the road, if not sooner.  They have a Tea Party affiliation and were elected on a platform of fiscal conservatism and "no more government as usual".  Geri Bentley specifically made reference to the $200,000 spent to move the Ghirardi Compton oak as an example of questionable government spending.  I ain't no political strategist, but if someone agitates about $200,000 but then declines to parse a contract for which millions of dollars could potentially be saved if only it were managed in a way that flew in the face of "government business as usual", it seriously does not pass the smell test. 

Quoth Galveston County Daily News on November 23, "Councilwoman Heidi Thiess also asked if the city had looked into going to a once a week trash pickup service for residential customers instead of twice a week."

Hallelujah.  Baby steps.   

Of course, Republic Waste's reported reply sounded like pure saber-rattling to me:  "Republic Waste Services representatives said that judging from other city’s (sic) that have gone to once a week, service costs may actually go up for the League City if it were to go to once a week." 

Yes, that's usually the way it happens in the real world - significantly decrease fuel consumption, equipment wear and tear, and labor hours, and program costs usually do go up as a result.  Not.

But I'm digressing as well as rambling. 

Here is the other important point to take away from GCDN's November 23 article:

• Trash collection costs for League City homeowners are now expected to rise between $0.60 and $3.00 per month under this new contract.  Is anyone surprised?  The City is apparently realizing the untenability of stiffing its commercial customers to the extent that had originally been planned.  Cost increases are therefore being shifted to our 26,000 households, apparently. 

Here is another very important point that was debated in the first public meeting but which has received scant news coverage to date:

• Republic Waste refuses to collect recyclables on the same day as trash, as Ameriwaste now does.  Furthermore, they refuse to collect anything whatsoever on weekends.  What this means under this new contract as it now stands is the following: League City in its entirety will be littered with the sight of refuse collection containers three out of every five business days!!  We're collectively going to have containers out there visible to the transiting public three days per week!  In the first public meeting, OKeeffe was horrified by the thought of that, and so am I.  We're trying to attract new business and new consumer spending to League City.  Will projecting a trash-centric OCD vibe help those goals?  Obsessive-compulsive disorder raised to a municipal scale: they can't seem to get their trash collected efficiently, so they have to keep putting their containers back out there most of the time.  Good grief. 

Anyway, we'll see what happens next with it.

Something Stinky, Part 2: Recycling Rates

This is a companion post to the questions I raised a few days ago about the trash portion of League City's waste contract. 

At the bottom of that post, I noted that, on October 31, 2012, I'd measured a recycling participation rate of just 43% of single-family households in my informal "study area".  This rate is potentially concerning from a financial perspective because it's so low. 

Here's where the analysis gets particularly frustrating because the information needed to properly assess this type of program is often either intensely politicized and/or is not publicly available in an accessible format.  The net result in this case is that I have far more questions than answers, but the questions are worth asking because, again, millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake. 

First of all, I note for the record that I am a huge, huge proponent of recycling - providing that the program is financially optimized to the point where it's in the best interest of the taxpayers who are footing the bill for it.  I'm one of those extremely rare homeowners who took the initiative to create my own superior recycling rolly cart...

Ain't she just a beauty??  Cost me six whole dollars for the spray paint to convert this regular trash rolly into an Ameriwaste-colored recyler.  This kind of container holds a lot more volume than the bins that Ameriwaste distributed, and it's also much easier to move around because it has wheels.  Photo from this post.

...and I would never dream of throwing perfectly good compostable yard trimmings or food waste in the regular trash - that's just an insensible waste of a valuable resource.

Photo from this post of just a few months ago, where I showed how simple the home composting process really is.  Not only can home composting keep a surprisingly large amount of organic matter out of landfills, the equivalent high-quality landscaping soil amendments that it replaces would otherwise cost about twelve bucks a bag by today's prices.  Talk about win-win-win: drag less waste to the curb, less waste ends up in landfill, more money in your pocket by virtue of costs avoided. 

Here's where the "not publicly available" and "intensely politicized" informational factors enter into the equation, though. 

My knowledge of municipal recycling challenges is partly predicated on what I learned as a previous homeowner in the Pineloch community of Clear Lake.  Pineloch was one of Houston's pilot program subdivisions for recycling several years ago.  At that time, we received information directly from Pineloch CAI (the homeowners association), but it was mostly in the form of paper circulars, which are no longer in my possession, unfortunately.  If I still had them, I could use them as concrete references for this post, but instead I must rely on memory.   

But here is what I do remember from those circulars and associated public discussions: 

Unless a municipality can raise recycling participation rates above a certain threshold, the program is simply not worth doing.  It costs so much in fuel, manpower, and equipment to deploy a recycling program that, without a good return on investment via participation, the municipality would be better off taking that same money and investing it on a different environmental initiative instead - the taxpayers would end up being better served that way.

City of Houston did a pretty good public outreach campaign in order to raise participation rates.  But they didn't really do it for the sake of friendly competition - I'm remembering that they did it because it was simply necessary to make the program viable. 

Compare these Round 2 participation rates (percentage of carts out) to the 43% that I measured about a week ago here in my League City example neighborhood. 

 Much has been said in the popular press lately about greenwashing - the process of spin-doctoring the facts to make a given situation or product appear more "environmentally friendly" than it really is.  Most of that coverage focuses on allegations of corporate greenwashing (such as this example), but municipalities often intentionally engage in this deceptive practice as well.  I'm not specifically accusing League City of doing this here - I'm simply noting that the practice manifests frequently across many levels of our government.  The example with which I am most familiar is the use of rain barrels.  In this post from a year and a half ago, I explained why they are not the magic bullet that many government outreach programs declare them to be.  And many munis know that these kinds of sales jobs don't represent reality - but their private conclusions about the issue often fall into the category of "the end justifies the means".  Specifically with rain barrels, raising environmental awareness within the public is frequently justified even if the method used to do it is actually cost-degenerative for everyone involved.

I don't agree with that analysis, first because it is cost-degenerative.  It lacks imagination and you have to remember that any cost-degenerative program also comes with a significant opportunity cost because it's displacing the non-cost-degenerative program that would otherwise be running in its place. 

And I also disagree with it because it's the kind of bureaucratic snow-job that gives conservation a bad name in general.  People are not stupid - they can detect when smoke is being blown up their rear ends.  League City's median family income currently stands at around $88,000 - this is an educated population that is fully capable of comprehending cost trade-offs on any issue.  Fully capable of comprehending what activities really are conservation-minded, and which ones are closer to the greenwashing end of the spectrum.  They can handle hard answers to real questions. 

So with those somewhat-rambling observations in mind, here are my questions for which I genuinely don't know the answers:

1. In dollar terms, how much of League City's trash contract is being allocated to support the household recycling initiative?
2. What are the recycling participation rates across League City as a whole?
3. Do those participation rates justify the costs of the program?  Has LC evaluated this? 
4. If they have evaluated that, can we see the resulting financial analysis?
5. If not, does LC have any plans to engage in outreach or other measures intended to increase the participation rate to a level that would make the program financially more viable?

If I didn't have a job and a family, I might have the time to run down some of those answers myself.  But we have City employees who should be providing that kind of a public service, don't we??

Would City of Houston (which, due to its much larger size, has studied recycling cost-benefit issues extensively) continue to pick these things up if only 43% of households were putting them out?

Does this make financial sense for the taxpayers?  Or would we be better off taking the same amount of dollars and instead dedicating them to parks or public green space set-asides or some other environmental initiatives that actually build value for our collective futures?

I'd love to know the answers.

There's something stinky with the trash contract...

...and it might not be what our local journalists and business people are thinking it is.  From rotten in the state of Denmark, we proceed to a discussion of putrescible in the City of League City. 

If you've been following this story at all, there arose a few interesting discussion threads on an article written by Chris Gonzalez and an editorial by Heber Taylor of Galveston County Daily News.  Writing for Bay Area Citizen, Y.C. Orozco (a journalist thus far unknown to me) penned perhaps the most comprehensive summary of the contract status and also the historical legacy (including a recap of the irregularities that characterized the letting of the present trash contract to Ameriwaste). 

On October 28, I began asking the obvious questions that don't seem to be arising in any other arena.  Now, I am the first to admit that I don't have any grasp of the legalities behind municipal trash contracting.  I note this because Bay Area Citizen quoted Mayor Paulissen as describing it as "a state process".  What the heck does that mean exactly, and what impacts might it have on common sense?  I don't know. 

But common sense is my default perspective, and common sense is increasingly leading me to conclude the following: 

The problem with the trash contract is not that it unfairly burdens businesses and other non-residential entities with a disproportionate share of the costs.  The problem with the contract is more fundamental than that - it's a bad fit to the needs of the city simply because it appears to be based on a surprisingly wasteful (no pun intended) set of logistical assumptions.

On October 28, I questioned why we had twice-weekly trash collection in the first place when residents of other local munis (most notably, City of Houston) pay for only one. 

Bear with me here because this question is not the non-starter that some people assume it to be.  Here is my more precise derivative question today:  has anyone actually studied this issue and gathered data to support a twice-weekly scenario with all of the extra millions of dollars that it obligates us to fork out (allegedly by shifting much of that resulting cost burden to non-residential customers) over the life of this new contract? 

I am not aware of any quantitative investigations, so (as unromantic as this sounds) I started gathering my own data (my dog does not care whether I carry a clipboard on our walks). 

I chose Section 9 of Centerpointe subdivision as my study area because it's convenient and because I know it well (n = 75 homes, of which only one was known to be vacant at data collection time).  According to HAR, Centerpointe's median appraised home value is $221,600.  That's within 10% of the medians for subdivisions such as South Shore, Tuscan Lakes, and Westover Park, and thus our little slice of suburbia probably represents a reasonable "League City bedroom community" approximation (and League City is dominated by such subdivisions).   I didn't tell anyone in advance that I would collect data, because I did not want to skew behavior (and because most people wouldn't care anyway). 

What I found was striking.  On Wednesday October 31, we had a 91% trash participation rate, meaning, 91% of households put out their trash for collection.  Wednesday is also our recycling day, so this was not a surprising result: peoples' brains generally register Wednesday as "trash day" here and many tend to put everything out at once. 

The following Saturday (November 3), which is our second weekly collection day, participation fell to just 56%. 

But what was most striking on Saturday was not that percentage by itself - it was the way in which those people were participating: most of them put out almost no trash. 

Many folks had so little trash to be collected that they didn't even bother to put it in trash cans or rolly carts, like they normally do on Wednesdays.  Of the folks who did bother to haul out their cans, this was a common sight - one tiny sack at the bottom. 

This was the common non-can alternative - bags simply placed on the ground.  That larger bag contains mostly uncompressed cardboard.

And this example.  Looks lonesome, doesn't he??  He has no friends to keep him company.  I could go on and on with pictures of this type. 

And this example.  This isn't even a kitchen-style trash bag - it's just a tiny handled shopping bag containing mostly junk mail.  Should management of this material be a huge financial priority for taxpayers??  Is our collective public health status somehow going to be jeopardized if little bags of general household rubbish are allowed to remain sitting in rolly carts for slightly longer periods of time?

Basically what we seem to have here is a situation in which League City taxpayers are forking out millions and millions of extra dollars so that these teensy weensy bags of trash can be picked up three to four days earlier than they would be otherwise. 

If, for the moment, we accept these data at face value, we can conclude that only about half of League City is availing themselves of this extravagant twice-weekly scheme - and worse - that half is just barely using it to boot. 

Obviously this is not a full quantitative scientific study here, because it involved only one subdivision and one pair of participation measurements (this being due to the newness of this trash debate).  But these results are qualitatively consistent with what my common-sense eyeballs have been telling me for years both in Centerpointe and at my former residence in Old Town:  League City residents don't really use this service the way it was apparently intended to be used.  They don't use it because they simply don't need it.  Like the 2.1 million residents of Houston, we could get along just marvelously with once-weekly service, at substantial tax dollar savings.  About half our populace has already volunteered to do just that, without even having been asked!

And the flip side of that resource allocation coin is the allegation that League City is shifting the cost burdens for this wasteful waste scheme onto our commercial businesses and local nonprofits.  It is alleged that the new scheme will cost Clear Creek ISD an incremental trash collection fee that is roughly equivalent to one teacher's salary!  Does any of this make a lick of sense?? 

I sure as hell would not vote for things to be this way, nor would I vote for anyone who votes for the likes of it.  I do not vote for initiatives in which I feel taxpayer dollars are being squandered. 

Reverting now to what Bay Area Citizen quoted Paulissen as saying, is there something about "state law" that compels small municipalities to scope trash contracts to be as wasteful as this?  If so, why isn't anybody doing anything about that?

And believe it or not, the situation might actually be even worse than all that, when evaluated from a financial viability standpoint.  On October 31, I measured only a 43% recycling participation rate.   That fact just in isolation has significant cost-benefit ramifications, but this blog post is getting long, so I will save that for a separate future entry.


Not much work to do this morning, boys:
An Ameriwaste truck cruising through a sparsely-trashed area on the morning of November 3.  The five closest subdivision lots in the foreground had collectively put out only two trash cans.  One of those was the same can pictured in the close-up above, the can with only one small bag at the bottom of it.