Red bowl surprise

Small Centerpointe backyard plus medium dog equals large headache where dog waste is concerned. 



Sometimes you'll see these kitschy little warnings installed on residents' front lawns. As if they do any good.

 

You know that I have an obsession with thinking outside the box, right?  Well, this time, I've chosen to think outside the bag.

These bags. 
Screengrabbed from this URL.

Let me explain through the usual logical strategy of presenting the starting conditions, describing the dilemma that those conditions generate, and neatly resolving the predicament via description of the creative solution. 

 

The waste management deal that was struck in our home was as follows:  The child wanted our family to get a dog - she was the sole driver behind that decision.  Therefore, the child has certain inalienable responsibilities with respect to that dog.  One of those responsibilities involves picking up dog poop on a daily basis, operative word being daily. 

 

This deal is non-negotiable, but there are two practical challenges associated with it:

1. The child cannot always fulfill this responsibility in a timely manner.  With school and other activities, there may be a significant lag time between the initial depositing and subsequent responsible remediation of said waste.  Meanwhile, life goes on, and Mama is frequently working in the back yard.  You've no doubt heard the expression, "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy"?  Well, if Mama steps in dog doo as she's doing her yard work, the situation morphs into the ultimate scenario in which there ain't nobody happy in this house.  Happiness becomes a distant memory at that point.
2. Children have eagle eyes in all situations except those in which they would rather not participate.  There have been too many times when the child has, indeed, fulfilled her daily responsibility, except she "missed one".  One in which Mama then proceeded to step.  Cue the widespread unhappiness.

So basically, we needed a workaround to these practical challenges, and this is what I came up with.

With a nod to general industry safety protocols and the OSHA Lockout-Tagout (LO-TO) standard in particular, I obtained this collection of fire-engine-red plastic bowls from Walmart.  They were about one dollar apiece.

LO-TO was designed for the control of hazardous energy.  The only real difference here is that I am controlling hazardous matter.  The principles are similar: identification and isolation prior to resolution of the maintenance demands that triggered the need for the procedure. 

Our dog delights in distributing a dung diaspora.  She isn't content to simply create her own cohesive daily pile.  Instead, she constantly turns around to inspect each nugget as it is produced, as if each and every fecal commodity were a new and unprecedented phenomenon (Do all dogs do this?  Or just our brain-damaged one?).  This quickly results in comprehensive coverage of our small back yard. 

You may find this paragraph above to be TMI, but my point is to illustrate the breadth and depth of this unhappiness-producing phenomenon.  If we were dealing with discrete daily piles, there wouldn't be as much step-on risk and as much urgent inspiration for a procedural work-around.  But our situation is not like that.  Not at all.   

So whenever I spot the offending hazardous material, I simply toss a bright red plastic bowl over the top of it until my child is available to do the collecting.  This procedure neatly resolves the two predicaments described above:

1. It effectively isolates real-time waste from Mama's feet, and
2. It removes all reasonable possibility that the child can legitimately claim an "Oops, I missed one".  Each and every one of them gets flagged with their own special Red Alerts - there's no way they can be overlooked. 

Of course, for every such instance of thinking outside the box or bag, someone will inevitably misinterpret the intent.  In our case, I was completely mortified to discover that our non-English-speaking lawn crew apparently deduced that we must be preserving dog waste for some special family ritual or something. 

 

I kid you not:
On those days when the lawn crew makes it to the lawn in advance of my child, they have this tendency to use the bowls to scoop the nuggets, then depositing the collection safely up against the slab so that they can continue with their mowing.  The first time I saw this, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. 

As for the child, well, I assure you that she doesn't appreciate this procedure nearly as much as Mama does.  At one point, she began grumbling that the only way she can stomach this undelectable responsibility was to visualize that, one day, she's going to lift one of those bowls and discover a gold coin rather than a brown nugget.  I responded that this was unlikely...

...but not impossible.
:-)

Seriously, if you're into the whole maternal revenge thing and/or if your child is particularly defiant about fulfilling this kind of responsibility, you could modify the procedure slightly to encompass a unique allowance delivery mechanism.  Now that's what I call a new take on an old shell game!  Just be sure that you bleach the magic bowl that will cover the bill instead of the bullet. 

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.

Trash cash: How much could we save?

In the "never get sick of beating a dead horse" post category, and following far more detailed posts (plural, and plural) on the same subject, I thought I'd expand my trash argument by pulling in just a few more general quantitatives. 

Why do this??  Because all of the logical arguments in the world fall short of a headline home-run if we haven't got a number to associate with potentially re-vamping the League City trash contract.  How much cold hard cash could we potentially save??  That is the bottom line we need to know and the exact sound bite everyone needs to hear. 

Is that really a bag of trash sitting beside that blue can?
Or is it actually a bag of money??
Microsoft Office clip art.

So if folks can temporarily set aside the escalating fear and loathing they feel for the federal government and allow me to use a general federal reference on these costs, here's what falls out.

First, may I please allow the federal government to state the obvious by my reproduction of the following quote from that publication:

In spite of the perceived need for twice-per-week collection, studies repeatedly demonstrate that the second collection day is underutilized. 

Translation:  people are simply not using the service.  Feel free to tell folks that you heard it here first.

"especially the South"? 
Like we're a bunch of sun-baked dumb-a**es who are the last to figure this stuff out??

But wait - it gets even better.  Here is another quote:

Keeping Customers Satisfied:  After a 6-month pilot program in Plano, Texas, 92 percent of survey respondents agreed they did not need a second MSW collection day each week. 

Plano's a city with some of the same Texas metroplex bedroom-community character as League City.  If Plano managed to muster enough common sense to snap to this realization, do you think it could possibly be within reach of League City as well??

Anyway, let me curtail the obvious idealogical tangent and proceed with the rudimentary cost analysis.

This is a general cost breakdown graph.
Let us accept at face value that 50% of the costs are incurred during the act of collecting the trash. 
Screengrabbed from this reference.

20121113 POST UPDATE:  I just noticed that this reference is from 1995, when diesel was about $1.10 per gallon, versus $3.28 per gallon as of today.  That makes the cost estimate below VERY conservative, as collection costs must have risen substantially with a tripling of fuel prices.   

Couple that with this bit:

Twenty to forty percent reduction in vehicle and labor costs?  Let's be conservative here and assume that going to a once-per-week scheme would eliminate 30% (i.e., the midpoint of that range) of that 50% collection cost factor.  Viewed roughly this way, going to once per week collection in League City would therefore be expected to result in a $4.5 MILLION savings for the League City taxpayers over the life of this next contract ($30 million current contract value times 50% associated with collection times 30% reduction). 

There's your sound bite number, crudely estimated, but somebody had to do it.

What could we instead buy with four and a half million bucks that would actually furnish lasting value to the city? 

• How many sidewalks? 
• How many dog parks? 
• How many new public parking areas for special events such as this one that actually help bring consumer recreation and disposable income spending to this city?
• Or if sidewalks and dog parks are not your baileywick, maybe it could instead buy more police officers to take the place of those red light cameras that are coming down!!

Screengrabbed from the same reference.

If anyone has a better savings estimate, please produce it, because this is important.  Ameriwaste is perhaps the entity most suited to putting a really fine point on that savings number, and I'm saying this not because I want them to receive a new contract but simply because they arguably are in possession of the mother lode of institutional knowledge right now.  And you should never underestimate the goldmine of potential that resides within institutional knowledge. 

Oh, but wait.  If we got our chosen vendor to supply lidded recyclers similar to the one I gussied up with spray paint for my own family, we could similarly cut recycling collection costs by a substantial amount because those lidded things hold far, far more volume.  So this $4.5 million is not nearly the limit of what could potentially be saved.  That actual dollar figure could be significantly higher. 

These things.  They hold so much more than those goofy small bins that we could easily go to a bi-weekly collection scheme if we had them, just like Houston does. 

So additional cost estimates are eagerly welcome here.  I'd really like to see this post be part of the beginning of the wider dialog, not the end. 

They turned out to be money bags afterall.

 

Turning trash into treasure: An open letter on the League City trash contract

Last night, City Council held its first of two public meetings to receive input on the new trash contract that City Council approved by a narrow margin (4 to 3) during the October 23 meeting. 

The meeting was intended as a forum for the airing of views regarding cost allocations between commercial and residential customers, as the new contract incorporates substantial increases that must be absorbed by someone.

But those views were not primarily what got heard last night.  What happened instead is that a clearer picture began to emerge regarding the very basis of the contract, which may have been flawed in more ways than I first realized.

I have argued (and argued) that the contract is over-scoped: it provides a greater intensity of service than is invoked by the needs of our collective residential and commercial situations.

Increasingly it appears, however, that the contract might also be over-funded:  the unit bases for the bidding may not reflect the reality of what actually exists.  This possibility became increasingly apparent as Ameriwaste representatives argued at length that, when viewed in real terms, they were not exactly guilty of proposing the bid increase of which they have been accused (to the point of losing the contract to another vendor). 

If you've never sat in on a City Council meeting before, I highly, highly recommend that you do it at least once (or watch at least one segment of the City's video feed, which is perhaps more convenient).

IF you do that, you will never again find yourself in a position of staring at a polling station screen and scratching your head in confusion over which candidates to vote for.  I sat there last night in that meeting marveling at the sheer diversity of personality and public service priorities exhibited by the individual members of that Council.  It's hard to believe that such a large range in basic perceptual skills and ideology could be found within a single biological species, let alone a single City Council.
:-) 

On one hand last night, there was Phalen and Mann, whose sole focus was propriety - specifically, whether or not the contract had been executed in accordance with laws governing municipal contracting. 

On the other hand, there was Becker and OKeeffe, whose sole focus was whether or not the contract represented a good value for the taxpayer, and who were summarily unimpressed by whatever degree of T-crossing and I-dotting might have been achieved during the mechanical execution of it. 

This wasn't stated explicitly, but I got the feeling that the whole thing boiled down to an argument between relative value and absolute value.  The four members of Council who voted FOR the new contract with Republic Waste two weeks ago were primarily concerned with how the numbers stacked up relative to what other local cities were paying for similar services.  And from that limited perspective, the contract looks pretty good, which I suspect is why they pushed so hard to approve it quickly and without further debate (and I don't mean to pin the blame for that on Phalen and Mann alone - Dawson and Lee appear to also have been characterized by that kind of thinking).  Their bottom line was that the lowest bidder was selected through a legal process.  That being the proven case, who cares about the rest?  Let's not sweat the small stuff, because League City has bigger fish to fry (Mann was particularly strident on this point last night).

I'll tell you who cares about the rest:  Any true fiscal conservative.  The issue of absolute value should not be dismissed out of hand without scrutiny, because it does not matter how "legal" a given contract is if the contract doesn't represent the best interest of the taxpayers to start with.  And "small stuff" in this case could amount to anywhere between a few hundred thousand dollars to millions and millions of dollars, depending on the lens through which one chooses to view the underlying assumptions that got crafted into the thing.

I don't have any personal political aspirations, so I can enjoy the luxury of being both blunt and potentially unpopular with what I say.  With that in mind, here are my recommendations for Council (with an 'i') as they go forward with this issue:

1. Meet with Counsel (with an 'e') in a closed-door session as he indicated would be necessary to discuss contract severance ramifications.  You first need to know the number (i.e., the financial penalty) that would be associated with breaking the contract at any given future point in time.    
2. Conduct the simple studies that I have advocated and set an example for:  take a quantitative look at how the good people of League City are actually availing themselves of the services procured under the existing trash contract.  Do the prevailing usages justify the scheme that was floated with no service refinements for the new contract? 

• If the answer to #2 is yes, no foul - continue under the new contract as designed.
• If the answer to #2 is no, do the math: compare the legal costs of breaking the new contract with the cost savings that would be realized by scrapping it and re-scoping it for a new bid round.  That basic arithmetic will tell you everything you need to know about how to proceed from that point.  (And you would not have to worry about service disruptions while this was playing out because Ameriwaste committed to an extension on their existing contract if the situation requires it.) 

I realize that there's a massive political component entrained in all of this, but I don't see how this kind of approach could be politically damaging - in fact, I think the opposite would be the case.  Suppose you guys did a study of trash disposal usage and found, as I did, that there is very little usage occurring on the second of a 2-day-per-week scheme.  If you eliminated the second collection day, yes, you would have some taxpayers screaming bloody murder in the commercial press about "service reductions" (probably a vocal bunch, but a decided minority).  But simultaneously, you would be armed with the world's strongest rebuttal:  "Listen, we did the studies, and we identified significant government waste within the existing scheme.  Too many people are simply not availing themselves of their second weekly trash day and this is costing extra millions of dollars for no good reason.  It is our mandate to prevent the waste of taxpayers' money.  That's the job you elected us to do, that's what we ARE doing, and here are the numbers to PROVE it..."

Not only would this not be politically damaging, I think it would actually be expedient when presented within that kind of perceptual framework.  To me, the whole thing is self-evident.

And regardless of how you move forward with these present contractual issues, please remember these iconic photos below (as iconic as trash photos could possibly aspire be) from my main post on this issue: 

This is the likes of what the good people of League City have been asked to pay for without ever being directly consulted.  These are just a few of the un-compelling reasons why we're paying for trash trucks to be sent around more than once a week.  We're paying for a contractor to pick up tiny bags of almost-nothingness a mere three to four days earlier than they would be picked up under a once-per-week scheme.  At some future point, as cost burdens continue to rise and as people intensify their demands for fiscal responsibility, you will be forced to evaluate the sanity of this practice.

Good luck to you all. 

"IIIII ain't got nobody..."

"Nobody... Nobody cares for me...."

"IIIIIIIIII'm so sad and lonely!
Sad and lonely!
Sad and lonely!
Nobody cares about ME."

Re-psychling the trash contract

This article in this morning's Galveston County Daily News discusses the re-bidding of League City's trash contract, and on that subject, I have two questions:

1.  Why on earth do we have twice-weekly trash collection in this city?!  Is City Council not aware of the fact that our neighboring two million Houstonians get along just splendidly with once-weekly collection, and have for much of eternity?  Twice as much service tends to result in something approaching twice as much cost.  And then folks complain about the cost.  Does this make sense?

Here is an excerpt from one of the City of Houston trash collection maps for the Clear Lake City area.  It says "Thursday", period.  Not multiple times per week.

2.  If the contract really is awarded to the low bidder, which is Republic Waste, are we going to have to paint our illicit recycle rollies to match their particular color scheme?

Current contractor Ameriwaste uses bright red recycling receptacles.

As I explained in this post from earlier this year, several of us here in Centerpointe (not just me) decided not to use those inconvenient open-topped bins, and instead painted our own rollies to match the Ameriwaste color scheme, so that the trash crews would recognize them as recycle containers...

...but Republic's color scheme tends to emphasize blue.
Truck pic screengrabbed from here. 

This second question is mostly a matter of bemusement, of course. 

But seriously, why are the good citizens of League City poised to pay $30 million for trash services when it seems like they could be paying significantly less??  Imagine what could be done with the money that could be saved by streamlining the service to a once-per-week schedule - millions and millions of dollars, maybe a tiny bit of which could be instead spent on installing sidewalks...

A public meeting on this issue has reportedly been scheduled for November 8 (although those meetings aren't listed on the LC calendar yet).  If I find the time, I will go and ask exactly that question. 

A well-oiled machine

A few words here on our local household hazardous waste collection event that is held periodically (annually??) in the immense parking lot at Gulf Greyhound Park, just so that you'll know what to expect if you ever decide to get rid of some of your nasty stuff there.

The Gulf Greyhound sign this morning, as seen beneath a beautiful mackerel sky inspired by yesterday evening's cold front, our first strong front of the season.

It's a very easy and quick process.  You drive into the main Gulf Greyhound entrance off FM 1764 and follow the volunteers' traffic directions.  They did a short questionnaire this morning, gathering statistics on what people were dropping off.  Then they had a line with a series of drop-off stations for appliances, e-waste, and toxic chemicals and petroleum products.

I had to drop off used automotive fluids that came out of an antique car my husband is restoring.  If you carry this stuff in your hatchback or trunk, it's a good idea to use some structure for secondary containment, just in case there are any drips or tip-overs.  Here I used a few empty plastic storage bins. 

This was the fluids collection area at Gulf Greyhound.  Good thing those guys were wearing Tyvek suits, because it was cold out, and I know from personal experience that nothing cuts the wind quite like Tyvek. 

They actually emptied my gas cans and gave them back to me, and so while I was waiting, I snapped a few pics of this truck in action as it was dropping off an empty waste bin. 

Up, up and away...

They don't call these things "roll-offs" for nothing.

At the entrance, they also handed out some general waste info, including a hard copy of a Houston Galveston Area Council brochure that looks like this:

Houston's own take on Rosie the Riveter.  No surprise that they're aiming the public outreach at women, eh?  Did you notice how I said my husband is restoring the antique car yet I (the wife) ended up being the one who delivered the wastes to Gulf Greyhound? 

We Can Do It... we can convince our husbands to clean up their garages... in theory.  But not always in practice.  Some of it we have to do ourselves.  Rosie screengrab from Wikipedia.   

Anyway, that's all there is to it.  It took me about 10 minutes from start of the line to finish.  No complexity to the process and no names were taken.  Just very efficient, like a well-oiled machine, literally and figuratively.  A well used-oiled machine to the tune of thousands of gallons, from the look of it. 

Reduce, Reuse, Re-psych-le

I always like to follow up on individual resident questions by posting the answers in this blog, so here's a good one. 

Have you ever walked out of your house only to find something like this in your front yard?

That happens in part because League City is still using those old-style open-topped recycling boxes:

These things are a pain in the following ways:

1. They allow pizza boxes to blow freely in the wind.
2. You can't really put paper products in them on days when it rains.
3. They can't really be stored outdoors (e.g., behind your fence) with your regular trash can, because they will get rained on.
4. They don't hold much.
5. They don't hold larger objects at all.
6. They are often difficult to carry when full.

A few years ago, I lived in the Pineloch community of north Clear Lake, which was one of the City of Houston's original pilot areas for testing those wonderful rolling 96-gallon recycling bins that are similar to trash totes:

The green one pictured here.  This is an old press photo from City of Houston's launching of their recycle program (I can't find a URL for it now).  City of Houston has been proactive with residential curbside recycling. 

I guess I got spoiled by those convenient green rollies because when I moved to League City, I was not willing to revert to using those nasty little totes.  However the trouble was, I could not get the AmeriWaste collection guys to recognize recyclables placed in any other container.  Every time I'd use something other than the red bin, they'd dispose of the material as trash instead of recyclables.

So I decided to do this, to psyche them into it:

Red is the magic color for this city, so I took one of our two existing rolly carts and spray painted it red...

...then I downloaded a recycling symbol (this one from Wikipedia), sized it, printed it out, and used a razor blade to cut out the arrows.

I then taped that to the side of the red-spray-painted trash can, and used it as a stencil to spray paint the symbol in white paint.

You could buy one of these recycling things from a big box store...

Ones like this are available at Lowes.

The trouble is, those for sale commercially are not red, and red is clearly the magic color for recycling in League City.  I don't know if collection personnel would accept this model as a recycling container.

Furthermore, those for sale commercially are expensive - the one pictured above is about eighty bucks.  I had an extra small trash bin on hand, so it only cost me six bucks for spray paint.

So there's the answer to one resident's question: how come I'm the only one in the neighborhood who enjoys the convenience of an upright, wheeled recycle container?  Because I made it myself.
:-)

Incidentally, if you need info on what materials League City accepts for recycle, you can find it here.