The idea was floated, and then it sank.
Mayor Nutter took the cash-for-trash message to the neighborhoods, and homeowners reacted as if he'd suggested plunging their hands into hot chicken fat. Our mayor is a veteran of 30 years in city government, but it seems he had to be informed by the voters that trash pickup is a basic city service already paid for by wage taxes and real estate taxes. It's not some fun frill that you bill a la carte.
When Nutter finally announced he'd abandoned the idea, he told the Daily News, "I've listened to citizens and their concerns, many of them practical concerns. . . . I think the public outreach process has been very, very beneficial to us."
So what's changed since then?
Nothing. And if cash-for-trash starts gaining momentum, watch us go through the same song and dance we did last year. Someone will point out that a flat fee is unfair to low-income households, so there will be all sorts of complicated and impractical ideas about how to make it a sliding-scale fee.
Someone will point out that renters will probably ignore the fee, so we'll debate ways to make absentee landlords pony up.
Then comes the notion of a fee-per-bag o' trash, so that people with more garbage pay their fair share. We'd have to buy stickers to put on our trash bags to make them eligible for a ride in a sanitation truck.
Can you think of anything more lame-brained? Last year, this fee-per-bag concept got kicked to the curb in about five seconds. That's how long it took for someone to picture how simple it is, in a city of rowhouse neighborhoods, to drop your trash at someone else's house, or in the nearest vacant lot.
Of course, owners of vacant lots and vacant buildings would be exempt from the household trash fee. How's that for logic? The cash-for-trash fee will only be paid by people who don't cause neighborhood blight!
