LAKEWOOD YARD WASTE COLLECTION CHANGES

[Richard Baker]

Once again, the City of Lakewood administration & council have caused the people who they are supposed to work for additional expense and inconvenience under the pertinence of green, efficiency, and injuries. The “Yard Waste Collection Changes!” has to be a pinnacle of deception the City of Lakewood government has propagated to the citizens of Lakewood.

THE REASONS:
1. If the city was surprised with the number of garbage cans people use for yard waste after discontinuing the use of said cans for household garbage, then the City once again had their heads in a place the light doesn't shine, a common anomaly in this City government.
2. Garbage cans slow the collection since they will hold twice the amount of waste that a paper bag will and bottom does not fall out when it gets wet.
3. Causes injuries, bending over to pick up 2X2 boxes off the ground won’t be difficult after all garbage cans have those inconvenient handles on them for lifting. From personal experience if any garbage can weighed more than forty pounds with dew on it, you could guarantee it was never going to be moved by a City employee.

THE GREEN:
1. Residents will have to use paper containers made from trees to put our yard waste into unless you have a never-ending supply of 2x2 cardboard boxes.
2. Most efficient recycling is the reuse or repurposing of an object. Example, continuing to use the thousands of garbage cans made obsolete by the new system for household garbage for yard waste.
3. Where of where will our garbage cans go since they are now redundant? In the landfill or recycling the program run so inefficient, it costs taxpayers to operate. When will they ever learn?

THE EXPENSE:
1. The City should have privatized the waste collection service when it had the chance and saved the taxpayers a lot more then “around?” a half of million dollars in addition to the capital expense for the equipment and maintenance.
2. If the City only saved $15,000 recycling in disposal fees then the cost to the taxpayers for the collection of recyclables must be in the hundreds of thousand dollars.
3. Residents now have to purchase paper bags for yard waste, another indirect expense to the citizens due to manipulative, inefficient, self-serving, wasteful, fumbling, costly, self-indulging, bungling, and inept City government.

I’m not sure if congress is the City of Lakewood council’s mentor or if the City of Lakewood council is congress’s mentor. Both lack common sense and handle the government finance with the same lack of intelligence.