It sounds like a scene, and assessment, from Philadelphia’s recently settled garbage strike:
Per the P-G:
“Full black and blue plastic bins. Snack bags and bottles strewn across city streets. And in some areas, old furniture lining sidewalks as college kids move in and out of their student housing.
“It’s a glimpse of how city leaders are currently struggling to execute one of their core services: trash and recycling collection.”
But it’s not about Philadelphia. It’s about Pittsburgh. Welcome to a city that not only can’t effectively plow snow from its streets in the winter but now can’t collect garbage with anything resembling regularity, let alone efficiency.
A long time ago, in a land not so far, far away, reasonable people conducted a very thorough and quite reasonable study that recommended the City of Pittsburgh contract-out garbage collection.
It became the dirty “P”-word for the Luddites of old Ways and the Forces of Union Protection. And it was just one part of 1996’s Competitive Pittsburgh Task Force findings. Later, an exercise that had the city-run service present a “competitive bid” against that of private services was so flawed — giving the city service an incomprehensible cost edge — that the loud and sustained guffaws echoed off Mt. Washington.
In a 2008 white paper (The True Cost of Garbage Collection in Pittsburgh: Can the City Compete with Private Contractors? Report #08-02), then-Allegheny Institute President Jake Haulk and then-Policy Analyst Eric Montarti came to this simple conclusion:
No.
“The city’s trash operation has never been efficient,” the think tank researchers said. Seventeen years later it’s still not efficient and, some would argue, it’s barely operational.
Simply put, Haulk and Montarti stated what should have been obvious to all parties at the time:
“(I)f the city is going to claim it is able to provide garbage collection cheaper than private contractors, it must calculate costs on an equivalent basis and must include all assignable costs to garbage to get a true and accurate estimate,” they said.
It’s elementary. But not for the bid-perverting, union-kowtowing city “leaders” of the past.
And with past being prologue, we have no expectation of the lame-duck mayoral administration to propose, let alone effectuate, meaningful reforms in Pittsburgh’s garbage collection.
But it must be an imperative for the next mayoral administration, in concert with City Council, to take bold steps to remedy what now can be classified as a public health crisis.
It’s a tall order (bordering on impossible), we know. But given the city has proven that it cannot do the job of refuse collection, it’s time for Pittsburgh to do what most municipal jurisdictions have done for decades – privatize it.
“Oh, no!” the usual suspects will wail. “Customers will be raked over the coals of these nasty, money-grubbing, profit-seeking private garbage collectors.”
Pity that they know not of what they wail. For it will be that very profit-motive that ensures service will be high and that costs always will be competitive.
Responsible bids should be sought from the private sector. And this long, filthy exercise in city-organized labor dysfunction should be buried in the landfill of lousy public policies.
Anything less is, well, garbage.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitue.org).
