All: I have been told by the Director of Solid Waste and Recycling for the City of Minneapolis that the termination of the Clean Sweep Program is NOT an economy forced on the city by the budget with dramatically lowered LGA. It is an economy planned months ago to be replaced with what seems to be a program of exhortations for everyone to take their waste to the local transfer station instead. (In my own defense, I will say that I was told by a lower-level employee that the reason for the program's demise was the budget. I didn't just assume it.)
While I was wrong about the reason for the cutback, I still think that the termination of the Clean Sweep Program is a false economy. Simply stated, the opportunity to take material to a transfer station is NOT a substitute for the Clean Sweep Program. The proof of that fact is the number of loads of "stuff" that are picked up during the Saturday of Clean Sweep. I have worked the trucks on that day for many years and the amount of loads hauled away to the burner is absolutely incredible and the number of households who participate by hauling their stuff to the curb has to be somewhere around 50%. If individual hauling to the transfer station really worked, we wouldn't be getting that kind of response. Furthermore, replacing Clean Sweep with nothing more than what seems to be repeated exhortations to use the transfer station is, in my opinion, likely to only produce more paper to be hauled away in the regular trash. In a perfect world, I suspect that people would collectively switch to taking stuff to the transfer station. But people are human and I suspect that these are but a few of the justifications used for NOT taking stuff to the transfer station: (1) It's too much and I don't have a vehicle that will take it, I don't know about vouchers, and I don't know all the rules on what the city will and won't take and I don't want to haul it all there and then get a nasty surprise when some worker adjudicates that I can't deposit anything because there is one thing that the city "doesn't take" in my load. (2) It's too little and I'll just wait until tomorrow (that never comes). (3) I don't have enough time to do that. (4) I'm physically unable to do the hauling -- I'm lucky that I can get it to curbside. (5) I don't want to take the paint to yet another place so I'll just put it one bucket at a time in the middle of my regular trash. Part of the reason for dropping of the Clean Sweep Program is the belief that most Minneapolis neighborhoods didn't support Clean Sweep and wanted graffiti removal and other services. So, I'm asking now whether other neighborhoods had effectively dropped out of Clean Sweep. Is Prospect Park really alone in its support of Clean Sweep? Steve Cross Prospect Park TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
