I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
City run trash collection is totally a thing in some areas, and it actually makes sense if done well. I once lived in a conservative city that had it (and did it well).
Where I live now, we have private trash collection. That meant we had dozens of garbage trucks from different companies driving through the neighborhood on every trash day, until one of my neighbors organized everyone to switch to one single company.
We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
>I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
Because my city is not good at being a city.
Sports stadiums are massive sources of revenue for cities.
> Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
That's not true. They're almost always a net loss and either way I'm not talking about the money that went to the stadium. I'm talking about the money spent on building a single pedestrian bridge to that stadium.
>It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
Obviously I meant 4 hours a week picking up trash in a single park.
I’m up in a small town in British Columbia, population circa 40K. Our compost is collected weekly; our recycling and garbage biweekly (garbage used to be weekly but they’ve supplied us with humongous wheeled bins now); our landfill separates trash by kind, sells what can be recycled, and keeps track of where it buried the rest; we have a massive composting facility that sells its end product; our sewer treatment plant sends its output to ranchland spray irrigation and golf courses. In the spring and fall, a chipping truck comes along and mulches any tree trimmings.
We maintain our infrastructure. Old underground services are regularly upgraded on schedule. Roads are resurfaced when they’re worn. Our downtown core was beautified a few years ago, with new trees, brickwork, etc. Down at the beaches, cottonwood trees are removed when they become hazardous; new trees are planted. Our parks are clean, despite the homeless living in them. Heck, we built several apartment buildings for those homeless that have their life together enough to qualify for residency (though provincial funding assisted on this.)
Over the past twenty or thirty years we’ve build a new swimming pool/rec centre; a multi-sheet ice rink; a truly excellent performing arts centre; acres of new park; a new track-and-field venue; removed a decrepit and failing arena; and are in the process of building out a new arena/outdoor sports centre. The only thing we’ve completely failed to implement is a new art gallery.
We do have a homeless problem (our weather is very nice) and there is a heck of a drugs problem (a lot of weed was grown around here back in the day, and there’s an undercurrent of gang activity involving the hard drugs). But on the whole, it’s a very laidback, safe, well-run community of caring people.
It’s sad that your town is a failure. It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.
They probably do have people who can administer with comparable competency, but I think the competency required to manage a town of 40k is very different from the kind of competency you need to get those results in a much larger town.
At small city scale, administrative layers can be thin and infrequent because of the smaller scale. Changing collections to be every other week could probably be a meeting with a few dozen workers. In a major city, that could be hundreds or thousands of workers, requiring administrative layers to handle rescheduling, handling concerns, etc, etc.
Small cities also generally have to develop smaller portions of their budget to dynamically adjusting to shifts in the city. How often do you have to build new roads and expand existing ones to handle shifts in traffic? What's the worst case scenario for traffic in a city of 40k, vs a city with millions of people? The major cities I've lived in are constantly having to build new roads and expand existing ones, and they're barely making a dent in the traffic problem.
Stuff like taking down trees and cleaning parks is pretty easy when the town is small enough to have a half dozen people do it. You need a whole administration layer when you can't have 6 people that just wander around parks fixing things that need to be fixed.
Like many things, I think complexity and cost of those services tends to scale exponentially with population rather than linearly.
Yes, it's a pretty astoundingly corrupt city. But stamping out corruption is one of the fundamental components of good governance.
TBF this one isn't government specific. It's often easier to fund a debt instrument for a big initiative than to find a revenue stream for a small obvious win. This happens in large companies, too, btw. You argue for years to consistently invest a small amount in something, the investment is never made, and then the company ends up acquiring to save itself from that exact underinvestemnt.