Dear Audrey,

I'm sorry.  It's been a very hectic day, and I wasn't able to have a proper e-conversation with you earlier.  I hope that by now, someone from WastePro has been to your house and your street to determine why the bins were still out there from three days ago.  You wrote to me to complain, and as you know, I replied, and I copied Heidi and Krishan.  They contacted Guerlin, who contacted Darryl, and I can't imagine the matter has not been resolved.  Let me know if it hasn't.

In answer to your question, no, I'm not sorry for my vote.  Under the circumstances, you're more than entitled to know why I'm not.

It's been one week into our contract with WastePro, and we've had glitches.  Boy, have we had glitches.  The first couple pick-ups went into the evening before they were complete.  People who were accustomed to their garbage being gone by noon found out it took much longer.  On one occasion, recycling was mixed with regular garbage to be dumped.  There's your issue about bins left out (and presumably not emptied by WastePro?).  My neighbor on the next block confronted me yesterday to say that he no longer has use of his alley to leave debris, and it will cost him more to have his gardener bag it and bring it to the front for pick-up.  He says the loss of use of the alley for refuse diminishes the "value" of his property.  It sure sounds like a mess.  As my neighbor reminded me, "it was all working well before."  He didn't ask me the question you did, but I could clearly hear it.

Most of the problems WastePro has had, and that we have had with them, will get better.  The route will get tighter, and WastePro is now thinking they may need to send three trucks instead of two.  The WastePro worker who rashly decided it was better to combine recycling with garbage than not get the route done has been informed of the mistake in calculation.  If WastePro was in any way responsible for the situation in your block, they will correct it.  (I hope it wasn't so simple as a homeowner forgetting to put the bin back.  I wonder if it was someone who had been accustomed to side yard service, but didn't request it from WastePro, and didn't expect to have to replace the bin him- or herself.  Darryl, Guerlin, Krishan, and Heidi will figure it out.)

Some problems can't be fixed, though.  For better or for worse, they would be problems whether we outsourced or not.  I think of my neighbor's complaint about the alley.  The reason we could use them is that our trucks were smaller than full size.  But one reason we had such inefficiency in our own system was that smaller trucks required more frequent trips to the dump, meaning the route took longer to finish.  It took two days per route instead of what will now be one day.  But even if we hadn't outsourced, we had to replace our trucks, and we determined to replace them with the larger ones, for greater efficiency.  Our larger trucks would not get down the alley any more than WastePro's, so that "loss" was going to happen no matter whether we outsourced or not.  Whether the loss of alley service adversely impacts property value is not in any way clear to me.  It would be clearer to you, in that you are a realtor, but even if it were the case, the vast majority of us don't live on alleys anyway.

The bigger issue, though, and the main reason I'm not sorry for my vote, is that the problems connected with not outsourcing are not fixable.  Yes, there are problems with not outsourcing, and no, they can't be fixed.  In fact, they only get worse.  We had a nice, low sanitation bill every year.  It was much lower than Miami Shores' bill.  We billed ourselves too low, because we were careless and short-sighted.  Whether we billed ourselves too low, because we were bad employers, is another matter.  We did not maintain and properly replace equipment, because we didn't plan the expenses in advance.  We should have, but we just didn't.  If you want to know why we very persistently failed to do this, I have no idea.  I'm told by some who have lived here a long time that every time we had to buy new trucks, we had to scramble to find money that was never saved for this completely predictable purpose.  Apparently, we never learned a lesson.  Ever.

We also maintained a crew of employees who were frankly, I'm sorry to say, not completely reliable about coming to work.  Every time one of them, or three of them, didn't come to work, other PW employees had to abandon their jobs to pitch in for sanitation.  That left the other jobs undone.  The alternative, which occasionally happened, is that the garbage route simply didn't get finished on the appointed day.  It might intrigue you to know that when that happened, no Village resident called in to complain about uncollected garbage.  That might leave all of us wondering why they seem to call in now, since we transitioned to WastePro, when it apparently wasn't a problem to them before.

As you might know, we also very persistently underpaid our prior sanitation employees.  Whether this was a factor in their seeming relaxation of dedication is unknown to me.

Had we not outsourced, we would have paid our employees more respectably.  This offer would have allowed us to hire two more sanitation workers, which we needed.  (We weren't able to replace the two empty positions, because the crummy wage we paid didn't attract applicants.)  We would have bought new trucks, which we needed anyway, and they would have been the larger ones.  So the route would no longer have included alley service.  As an independent manager of sanitation services ourselves, we would have been tasked with proper maintenance of vehicles and equipment, which we did not do before.  That, too, would have resulted in a higher sanitation bill.  If you want to blame either decades of lay Commissioners or two prior professional managers for these lapses, help yourself.  I don't see what good it does to assign blame.  The bottom line is failed foresight and failed maintenance.  With WastePro, we have a firm contract, including price.  On our own, we pay whatever it costs, whether there are unexpected problems, rising fuel and dump costs, or anything else.

The result of this is that without outsourcing, we have several "challenges," they are not predictable, and they are guaranteed to get worse.  Costs for any of these things do not go down over time.  And they do not rise at a predictable and manageable rate, as they do with an outsource contract.

So that's why I'm not sorry for my vote.  I clearly recognize the sense of loss and disappointment, and the inconveniences to some of us, including me (I live on an alley, like my neighbor does).  But of the choices, outsourcing was the better one.  If WastePro persistently fails us, which I doubt, we will cancel the contract with them.  We will then either find a different contractor, or we will once again try to do this ourselves.  If I have anything to say about it, we will not stick our heads in the sand, undercharge ourselves, and imagine it will all work out just fine.  It doesn't.  We will pay a proper sanitation fee, which for the coming year would have been in about the mid $700s.  It will go up every year after that, and we have no way to predict how high it will go.

I see, by the way, how exercised are the complaints about WastePro.  What we didn't learn, and maybe some day we will, is what kind of "feedback" we will get when we send out sanitation bills that are a couple hundred or more dollars higher than the ones to which we were accustomed.  As bad as that might be, it will be made a lot worse when it is compared to the lower bill that results from outsourcing.

Are the bins gone by now?

Fred