Pittsburgh’s Public Source reports that calls to the city’s 311 help line reporting city-run garbage collection “whiffs” have surged.
“In some neighborhoods, complaints are 10 times higher than in others,” the story says.
“Pittsburghers are increasingly finding themselves stuck with garbage after collection day, 311 data shows,” Public Source reports. “While the number of service requests to the City of Pittsburgh related to missed collections has been on an upswing over the last decade, a marked shift began after the pandemic.
“Now these complaints number more than 10,000 each year,” the news outlet found.
So, is Pittsburgh ready yet to do what 78 percent of all municipalities in the United States do? That would be to entertain common sense and cost-savings by privatizing refuse collection.
It’s something the Allegheny Institute has been advocating for the last 30 years. But it’s something that the chances of coming to fruition are slim to fat to none.
Nobody’s talking about it (except us). And it’s not showing up in any of the reportage on the city-run system’s long-documented chronic failures. Which is a tragedy because of the manifest benefits privatizing refuse collection would bring.
Per the National Solid Waste Management Association, privatized refuse collection can cut costs anywhere from 20 to 40 percent. It can improve innovation and efficiency, reduce government bureaucracy and also reduce refuse worker injuries, the data show.
Some – think of organized labor, first — have argued that privatizing refuse collection will result in poorer service because of that “greedy profit motive.” But that’s garbage — as fundamental economics teaches us.
Simply put, and from various scholarly sources, it is the profit motive that creates greater efficiencies by incentivizing businesses to minimize costs, to innovate, to eliminate waste, to maximize financial returns and, in the end, provide customers with better service, no matter what that service is.
It is in the contracted-out service provider’s best interests to do just that.
The truly greedy in this insidious debate are those in government employ and union subservience who shill for a status quo that plumps ups the former’s political fortunes while padding the latter’s pockets, all while disserving the public.
Pittsburgh’s steadfast failure to contract out refuse collection through a competitive bidding process is the definition of “garbage.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
