Trash bin boondoggle: winners and losers

WINNERS
If landlords are required to provide trash bins for their single-family rentals as the City Safety Committee intends, the obvious winners will be trash haulers. No longer will they need to solicit business from these residences, worry about collections, nor attend to the problems of families who use these “free” bins. All this will be provided by the property owners.

Trash haulers would not have to start and stop services as renters move in and out, set up new accounts, close out old accounts, attempt to make difficult collections or write off bad debts.

Less work, more profit. And who’s next in line for gifting? - water, electric, gas utilities for their convenience and profit?

LOSERS
The losers are the landlords. Those of us who obey the laws, are good neighbors, try to get good tenants and who run a tight ship. We would be required to pay these bills and we’d take care of it.

But the slumlords, the culprits? They don’t obey the laws now and this won’t change that attitude. Nothing will change, their properties will continue to be trashed, and they will receive no effective punishment.

Landlords will have to increase rents to cover trash, and while that may sound like a simple matter, it isn’t. In the first place, not all renters require trash service; under this system they’ll pay for it anyway. Their defense will be to rent somewhere out of the city.

A higher price tag for rent - no matter what you include among services - is a higher price tag. This tag has already - or should have already - been increased because of the increased school property taxes being felt this year.

Code enforcement costs will hit city taxpayers harder when trash-bin policing begins, if it does - which I doubt. Here’s why: If enforcement is to be certain, uniform, and fair, the city will have to set up a data base, a clerk, and a foolproof way to coordinate with the haulers.

The winners would be the trash haulers. The losers would be landlords (not slumlords), renters, and taxpayers.

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CORRECTION: Legislation regarding trash bins will not come before City Council for consideration as early as I believed. Councilman-at-large Dave Rhodes said that the proposal is in the hands of City Law Director Doug Sassen and that it likely will go back to a Council committee again 2/22/10 before it goes to full Council the following Monday, 3/1/10. I have made corrections in the previous two essays on this subject.
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NEXT & LAST: GET RID OF TRASH BY ENFORCING THE LAW