Since Oct. 1, 2017, the City of Pensacola’s Sanitation Services has collected its customers recycling every week and dumped the recyclables at the Perdido Landfill instead of actually recycling them, and the city will continue to do so, at least, through June.
The cost savings of dumping the recyclables with the regular trash could be rebated to the customers.
According to the FY 2018, the annual budget for recycling is $983,800. The city could divide half of the budget among its 19,535 customers and give each $25.18 — which is almost equivalent to a month’s free service.
Mr. Lewis seems to know where a lot of the bodies are hidden in our town. Over these many years, I think he has provided sound ideas and solutions to numerous governmental problems that were never considered by our city’s brain trust.
I suppose Mr. Lewis is a threat to the status quo, which is not a bad thing.
In 2008, ECUA and city staff discussed the city granting ECUA the franchise to pick up the garbage inside city limits. The deal reportedly fell apart because ECUA would not guarantee to hire all of the people working in the city’s sanitation services division to include all of the supervisors. No doubt, the people who did the real work actually picking up the garbage were not going to lose their jobs. This idea made even more sense in the areas of the city where one part or side of a street is in the city and one part is not such as Sanders District in District 2. Two weeks ago, I was driving behind a city garbage truck zipping north on Sanders Street. It was spewing plastic bags, paper plates, egg cartons and Styrofoam all over the place, both in the city limits (the west side of Sanders Street), the non-city part of the street to the east and in the middle of the street. The truck then kept it up going down Burgess Road before turning onto Councilwoman Sherri Myers street presumably to pick up her trash and then dump some of it in Parker Circle Neighborhood Park. In 2008, I was told that city staff was keeping the proposed recycling program secret from the City Council. During an Environmental Advisory Board meeting, its city staff minder Thaddeus Cohen said that the board had no right to think about recycling and the City Council would be kept in the dark until they decided to tell them. Similarly, the ECUA deal was kept from at least some of the City Council. When I mentioned it to Mayor Mike Wiggins in 2009, he told me he knew nothing about it. In hindsight, the city should have taken the deal and found new jobs for any sanitation workers that ECUA did not want. As ECUA board member Lois Benson then explained the proposed deal to me, ECUA was offering to transfer title to the old wastewater treatment plant land to the city at no cost, a deal allowed by state law. I have spoken with my ECUA board member Dale Perkins and suggested that ECUA take the initiative putting together a plan to take over sanitation services inside city limits. My assessment is that ECUA would provide better service at a lower cost. I would prefer that the city keep its garbage cans because given the helter-skelter meandering of the city boundaries that is the only way most of us know when we are actually inside city limits. The city and ECUA have different approaches to green waste. In my hometown of Sacramento, we had a third green waste can. Many people do not need one but for those who generate green waste, perhaps that could be a small optional fee. The city would benefit from having less “stuff” get into the stormwater system. Many commercial businesses that do yard work do dump their yard waste in city streets in violation of the City Code. Businesses should be made to haul away their own trash if they now do not. One advantage of ECUA picking up the garbage is that they pick it all up on the same day. Dale thinks that leads to more conscious sorting of recyclable materials and he may be right. Bottom line, even though the Escambia County Consolidation Study Commission on which I served turned out to be a total flop, we could have but failed to propose a laundry list of functional consolidation initiatives that could work. We could have at least salvaged something good to benefit citizens. From the city perspective, the Environmental Services, Library and Animal Control Services are all already consolidated functions now performed by the county. ECUA is an agency of the county government. It just makes sense to let ECUA pick up the trash. Then, it would make even more sense for Escambia County to transfer title to the Perdido Landfill to ECUA bringing down ECUA’s operating costs even more. Or we can be dumb and just keep doing things the way they have always been done because we fear change.