What I Supported Was Not Smoke and Mirrors. What You Support Might Be. Sanitation, Again.

The proposal was this.  WastePro will do what the BP sanitation crew did: they will collect and remove all the refuse from the Village.  In addition, they will do what the Miami Shores recycling function did: they will collect and remove all the recyclable material from the Village.

They will remove the garbage for less money than we paid to run our own service, and they will not involve any Village employees.  Any difficulties they have doing this job will not result in Village employees' having to suspend their own work to bail out the garbage collection function.

As for the recycling, they will remove it for the same fee we paid MSV, but from now on, they will return to us any excess money they make from the company that receives and uses the recycled material.  MSV didn't do that, so recycling will now cost us less than it did.

WastePro will do all of this efficiently and courteously.  They will also cheerfully hire any of our sanitation workers who are content to be garbage men, and they will pay them more than we did.

But wait, as they say in infomercials, there's more.  While it took our BP sanitation crew two days to complete garbage pick-up from the whole Village, WastePro will do it in one day.  And where our crew made do with one truck, or occasionally two, both in poor repair, WastePro is prepared to send three trucks, and they will be in excellent condition.  They will not leave puddles of home and kitchen waste in the street, as our trucks did.

In case any of us were wide-eyed and gape-mouthed, wondering if the next thing that would happen would be the appearance of Santa Claus, this change was not magic.  It was just hard work and dedication to getting the job done.  But it wasn't to be the same job.  It was the fundamental task, done better than before and in half the time.  More and better equipment and more people, if necessary, and hard work and dedication to getting the job done.

What we're talking about is a transition.  Is it impossible to imagine, or to accept, that transitions are sometimes imperfect, especially at the start?  "We're all adults here," as they say.  We can be a bit patient and understanding, can't we?  Evidently, being supportive and even helpful is too much to ask.  But what about patient?  WastePro has done this before.  It's always the same procedure.  They take over a garbage collection function someone else was doing, and their mission is to do it better and cheaper.  It takes them and their crews a little while to refine the route, after which time they accomplish their goal.  And the community accomplishes its goal.  But it takes that initial little while for WastePro to adopt the most efficient rhythm.  It's getting better already, although they still haven't yet consolidated this task into a one day route.  They've had to come back to finish the next day each time.  But their goal is in fact to do this in one efficient day.  Our goal never was to do that.  We couldn't have.  We didn't have the equipment, the personnel, or the dedication to getting the job done efficiently.

But let's say you think you just don't have the patience.  For whatever reasons, you liked it exactly the way it was, and that's the way you want it to be.  You don't want any kind of "transition."  You even want the exact same broken down trucks and the exact same Village employees.  We'll set aside that you could have had them, if they had wanted to continue to do this job for WastePro (which apparently they did not), and that eventually, they would retire, and you'd have to get used to someone new anyway.  But just for now, you didn't want anything at all to change.  The result of your wish would have been a significantly higher sanitation bill.  (The Village was going to force you to accept having serviceable equipment, and it was going to insist that we/you pay these employees at above the County poverty level.  It was also going to require you to support a crew of enough people to get the job done, instead of not enough people.) 

I have an exercise for you, and I'm going to give you a frame of reference for this exercise.  As it happens, I personally don't think we tax ourselves high enough to meet our fiscal needs.  The last time I tried to do something about this, I asked the Commission to tax Village residents at 10 mills, instead of 9.7 mills.  The difference would have been an average of about $40 a year per house.  The Commission vote against me was 4-1.  No freakin' way we're going to charge ourselves $40 a year per house more than we're paying now, whether we need the money or not.  There wasn't a great deal of support from non-Commissioner residents, either.  Even neighbors who typically agree with me about such things weren't showing support for something as unrestrained as a $40 per year per home tax increase.  Subsequently, in a workshop with County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, I said the same thing.  I didn't quite get laughed out of the room, but it was close.  Raise your taxes as high as you easily can?  Are you insane?  And no one even cared what we needed the money for.  There was just a reflex not to want to pay taxes. 

So here's what you do.  This is your exercise.  Go around to all your neighbors (not just your friends who will say they agree with you), and tell them you think we should be paying about $280 per home per year more than we are, to take away the garbage.  If they ask you why, assuming you get that far, tell them it's because you personally like the garbage men who used to work for the Village, and although the system was inefficient, and we underpaid these guys you like so much, you just think we should pay more to keep them here and buy them new garbage trucks.  Let me know how it goes.  If you're successful with this appeal, I want to know how you did it, so I can try again next year to get the Commission to raise the tax rate.

In the meantime, please try to be a little more patient.  It's not perfect yet, but it's getting better.  And remember the mission: better and cheaper than it was, in half the time.  If your garbage isn't collected to your very complete satisfaction, don't bother to tell Heidi Shafran or Krishan Manners or me or Chuck Ross.  We don't pick up the garbage.  Contact WastePro through the Village website (look for the boldly presented "TracEZ" link in the middle of the opening page).  We'll get there.  And as they also say in infomercials, here's even better news: if this never happens to all of our satisfaction, the Village will cancel the contract with WastePro, we'll buy new garbage trucks, we'll hire back the people you like so much, and we'll send you that sanitation bill you said you wanted to pay.