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Monday, August 3, 2009

Sorry! My Bad!

A new day for recycling pickup in American Fork, and some thoughts on the program generally.

New Day

We returned from northern California the other day to find a notice that recycling pickup day is changing from every other Tuesday to every other Monday. I assume this is citywide. I also am forced to assume that it starts today, since I wasn't bright enough to read the flyer carefully before, ahem, recycling it.

I see no reference to this at American Fork's Web site, and the recycling calendar there still shows Tuesdays, but my neighbors all put their bins out last night or early this morning, so I'll assume that they were more attentive than I was. I have updated the recycling calendar here, at least.

The apology in my title is there because I meant to post this alert earlier -- days earlier, in fact -- but did not. I discovered this just now, when I sat down to blog over lunch, as I often do. So I apologize if the reminder comes too late to help you this week, but at least you'll know what happened for next time.

While We're on the Subject

Here's a recent Daily Herald article by Barbara Christiansen. One paragraph says:

The charge has gone up to $5.40 per household participating in the bi-weekly recycling. Originally there were estimates that the more people participated, the lower the cost would be. Instead it has increased slightly, but the charge from Allied Waste has remained the same. The increase is for city overhead in the billing process, said Chief of Staff Melanie Marsh.

The previous monthly charge was $4.50, by the way. That's a lot of "city overhead in the billing process." And I'm still not convinced that the City pressed the matter of economies of scale sufficiently hard when they renewed the Allied Waste contract. Did staff ever get, or even request, hard numbers on this?

The article reports that 2746 households opted out of the program. I suppose they all used that grossly unprofessional opt-out form, which as of this writing is still at the City's Web site, unimproved. I suppose this also means that 2746 households received a snotty, probably ghost-written letter over Mayor Thompson's signature, including the sentence, "I'm sorry you don't see that you have a role in protecting our environment." (The good news -- if it is good news -- is that recent improvements in the City's professionalism still leave room for further improvement.)

Good grief.

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