Roxan Staff
Wm. K. Gordon, III
                             

05/22/03  When does the Madness Stop?  Enough is  enough!

If anyone has a reason to snicker at the council's considering delaying the 2nd tier of the police/firefighters' 5%-5%-5% raise, it would be me.  I was one of a handful of citizens who campaigned for their 17% raise last year.  They sure did nothing to help my campaign!  That said, I am not laughing. 

	Paying our cops and firefighters is a good investment.  Your homeowners insurance premiums are based in part on police and firefighters' response time to our emergencies.     The slower the response time, the more you pay for insurance.     The slower the response time, the more likely the bad guys can do you harm.     The slower the response time, the more likely a small fire consumes your home and personal treasures.

The Mayor and council want the cops to generate more speeding tickets to increase the ticket revenue.  Will that revenue increase be tied to their 5% raise?  Will that revenue increase go directly to the Police Department for payroll?  Dr. Bill Gordon calls it trading revenue for respect.

Councilman Leo Chaney wants thousands of tax dollars to give to some of his friends to teach grandparents how to take care of their grandkids, but he thinks our cops and firefighters who are raising their own kids can go without their promised raise.  It is nothing new for some grandparents to be raising their grandchildren.  Sometimes, it is the best thing for the grandparents and the kids.  The grandparents may have learned from the mistakes they made raising the kids' parents.  The kids may be of help and company to their grandparents.  

This is also the guy who keeps $500,000 in the budget so his constituents can pay their utilities at the MLK Center.   How many squad cars (that don't explode) or fire engines could we buy for $500,000?

The council will find the money to fund all those cultural affairs projects.   Rather than in transportation to the airport, they put over $500,000 worth of "art" in the tunnel between the garage and the terminal at Love Field - - over half a Million!  They will put hundreds of thousands worth of "art" in the new animal shelter.  Those poor critters will not notice whether the wall is bare or decorated -- they only want to be safe and fed.  All based on a council ordinance, not a citizen referendum. 

Much like the Trinity Bondoogle, the council made statements in the May, 2002 pay referendum that the police and firefighters would get a 15% raise spread over 3 years if the voters would turn down the referendum.  An increase in your property tax is deductible from your federal income tax.  An increase in the insurance for your home is not tax deductible.

We can fund assistance programs to teach grandparents what they already know.  We can fund "art" in garage tunnels and animal shelters.  But, council can't find the money to keep their word to the sworn personnel?  That is really pitiful.

Dallas council eyes delay of police, fire raises; Property-tax preview shows bigger budget deficit than projected  05/22/2003  By COLLEEN McCAIN NELSON / The Dallas Morning News

. . .   The council took its first crack at next year's budget, and several members quickly zeroed in on police pay increases as a possible source of funds. . . .  Some council members said they could not stomach shelling out generous raises for one group of employees while shortchanging another.  . . .  Leo Chaney Jr. suggested delaying police and fire pay increases by three or six months.  . . .  Council member John Loza said he would support a three-month delay and said he thought uniformed employees might agree to the plan "in the interest of cooperation." . . .  Mayor Laura Miller and several other council members said they are willing to consider a three-month delay. . . .  "The mayor made a promise, and I think she needs to keep her promise," said Gil Cerda, president of the National Latino Peace Officers Association. "I'm all for giving the civilians raises. They deserve a raise just as well as we do, but it's the mayor's job to figure out how she's going to do it."     Council member Mitchell Rasansky agreed that the council should not hedge its promise to police and firefighters.    "I really have a problem when we say we're going to do one thing, and then we do something else," he said. "I'm not sure that [the delay] is the right thing to do." . . . Staff writer Tanya Eiserer contributed to this report.

It's not like the sworn officers didn't see this coming.  When the council members campaigned against the 17% pay referendum, there was a clear understanding that the officers would get 15% instead, spread over 3 years.  This is so wrong!

Because she took the lead in killing the pay referendum, Mayor Miller must take the lead in keeping that 5% raise on schedule.  It will reflect very badly on her personally to do otherwise.

The sworn rank and file should look to those council members their unions endorsed -- those council members who got union PAC money.  

This is dumb thinking -- just about as dumb as  the proposed changes in the trash pickups.

	Other than my dogs and cats, it's just me generating trash at my house.  I could get by on once a week trash collection.	Pauline Hill: A supply of labor can't be the problem.  (Check out the 6 figure-salary people just waiting fora  job--so desperate for jobs they are touching the indigent aid depts.) Once a week-garbage pick-up might be adequate IF   the citizens could be guaranteed a once a week pick-up. The city needs more recycling bins for newspapers, metal cans and glass. Every school should have a place for recycled paper and cans. These containers would be convenient for parents to dispose of these materials as their children are taken to and from school. (It would make misc. money for the schools.) On a lighter note---the city needs to call Tony Soprano to sort out this trash 'bidness'.  It's a mess!
I seldom fill my trash can, except for holidays.  For my needs, once a week collection is a good idea.  For my neighbors who have 5 kids and my other neighbors who are medical students, once a week will not do if they are only allocated one can.   I don't take the newspaper, but I do recycle lots of paper from my business.  I recycle aluminum cans, although the little man who collected them from me recently died and I need to find a new can man.

Who would have ever thought DallasArena.com would agree with Councilman James Fantroy?  On this issue he is right.

Southern Dallas council member trashes garbage plan 05/21/2003  By SELWYN CRAWFORD / The Dallas Morning News

. . .  "In my district, people don't go out to eat all the time. They eat at home," said council member James Fantroy, whose district is in southern Dallas. "So that means we've got more trash. What you're trying to do now is not pick up our trash. And that's going to make it trashy. And I'm telling you now, I'm going to keep my district looking good."  . . .  after he and the four other members of the council's Health, Environment and Human Services Committee received a report from the mayor's recycling task force, headed by businessman Trammell S. Crow. . . .  task force recommended that collection of recyclables remain at once a week and that the list of such items be expanded. . . .  bulky trash such as furniture be picked up only three times a year instead of monthly, as is now done. Brush would continue to be picked up on a monthly basis. . . .   the committee said that they understood Mr. Fantroy's concern but that the new solid-waste collection ideas are necessary, environmentally and aesthetically. . . .  "While I am sensitive to the concerns of Mr. Fantroy, I think we need a plan that is both convenient and easy," said committee chairwoman Lois Finkleman. "And then we need to hit the education component." . . .   committee member Veletta Forsythe Lill also disagreed with Mr. Fantroy's stance and said Dallas residents must embrace recycling.      "What we lack in Dallas is a recycling ethic," Ms. Lill said. "We believe it is a luxury [to recycle] rather than a necessity. We need to see it as a necessity." . . .  Mr. Fantroy was resolute in his opposition to the plan. . . .  He said families in his and other southern Dallas districts tend to be larger and therefore have more garbage. . . .  Jody Puckett, the city's director of sanitation services, . . .  acknowledged that the city's current recycling program is "a bit anti-big family."  . . . confirmed that processing plants in the city's southern sector handle more garbage than other parts of the city.

Interestingly, Councilwoman Lill once again wants to impose her ethics and aesthetics on people without their input.  If the limited recycling program we have has been a total failure, why would expanding it be more successful?  The failure has been on the part of the city -- not the citizens.

Down in the Dump; City's new recycling center just can't seem to master recycling 5/22/03 COMPILED BY PATRICK WILLIAMS

One of Buzz's favorite episodes of the TV show South Park introduced characters called "underpants gnomes." They're dim, vulgar pixies who steal little boys' underpants as part of a grand business strategy. The plan? Step 1: Collect a big pile of underpants; Step 3, the profits. The joke is that they don't really have any clue about what Step 2 should be, but they're certain that a big pile of underpants will someday lead to profits.    That, to Buzz's mind anyway, makes a pretty fine metaphor for Dallas' recycling program.   In November, with the usual hoopla, the city opened what it calls the "Citizen's Convenience and Recycling Center" at the McCommas Bluff Landfill. The center, which amounts to a concrete pad and open building with a metal roof, originally was supposed to be an elaborate garbage sorting facility. It was supposed to be a place where valuable garbage like aluminum could be salvaged. The North Texas Council of Governments awarded the city a $250,000 grant in 1998 to build a recycling center, and the city purchased several 20-cubic-yard containers. . . . In the months since, the center has been less than a raging success, recyclingwise. The city has yet to fill even one of its containers with plastic, glass, newspaper or aluminum, says John Barlow, waste diversion manager for the city's sanitation department. In fact, there aren't even containers marked for aluminum or newspaper. . . .  A worker at the center who did not want to be identified says the center mostly gets loads of regular household waste, along with a lot of Sheetrock and a little newspaper. . . .  "A lot of the citizens aren't really aware that this is available for them to recycle, so we're just doing our best to get the word out.". . . . As for the recycling part of the recycling center? Well, Buzz supposes the city is still working on that part of the system. Perhaps they should consult with some underpants gnomes. dallasobserver.com | originally published: May 22, 2003

There are two other Dallas Observer article on the city's recycling efforts:

Garbage by Numbers; City's recycling rate takes a dive 3/06/03 COMPILED BY PATRICK WILLIAMS

Exactly how bad will Dallas' curbside trash recycling program have to perform before anyone with city government acknowledges that it just ain't right? . . .    survey published last month by the trade publication Waste News found that only 2.2 percent of the city's residential waste was recycled. Last year's rate was 4.6 percent. In 2001, it was 19 percent.    Buzz isn't great with numbers, so give us a moment to do some crunching to put those figures in perspective. Lessee, take 19, divide by the cosign, toss in a few logarithms. OK, here goes. The decline, in percentage terms, from 19 to 2.2 percent equals a whole freakin' lot of money down the rat hole. . . .  ("Garbage In, Garbage Out," by Charles Siderius, May 16, 2002). The Observer reported that Community Waste Disposal, the city's privately contracted recycling hauler, was operating with so little oversight that the city had no idea how much was being collected. . . .   City officials were not alarmed by our first story. . . .   they were going to put together a recycling task force and were going to have meetings. The city's curbside recycling program, which cost water utility customers about $2.4 million last year, rolled on. . . .Buzz figures that at the current rate of decline, in another couple of years the city will actually be dropping off bundles of old newspapers and beer bottles at every resident's door. dallasobserver.com | originally published: March 6, 2003

This article by Siderius is very long, but you should use the link to read it in its entirety.  Councilwomen Lill and Finkelman want to blame the citizens for the city's sorry recycling program.  As usual, the citizens are doing their part, but the program operators are 90% of the problem and lack of City Hall supervision is the rest.   "What we lack in Dallas is a recycling ethic," Ms. Lill said.  

Here's another Observer article on Dallas recycling:

Garbage In, Garbage Out Why Dallas' recycling program is a $17 million joke BY CHARLES SIDERIUS 5/16/02

On January 4 at Community Waste Disposal's recycling center off Northwest Highway, driver Israel Esparza pulled his truck onto the scales, fresh from his route in the Walnut Hill area with a load of bottles, cans and newspapers retrieved from the city's loyal recyclers. He used a keypad linked to a computer and the scales to punch in his truck number and route.    The computer spit out a ticket. It said his load weighed 2,580 pounds. It also showed the time, 5:32 p.m.    Two minutes later, at 5:34 p.m., Esparza and his truck were back on the scales with another load. This time, the computer's scale ticket showed that his truck contained 2,440 pounds of materials. . . .  In February, Jody Puckett, the city's department of sanitation services director, told the Dallas City Council that in less than two years Community Waste Disposal increased recycling tonnage by 11 percent and participation by a whopping 43 percent, or by 15,000 Dallas households. After 10 years of sputtering, it seemed recycling was finally catching on in Dallas. . . . it's difficult to evaluate a program without hard and fast numbers, and with Community Waste Disposal, the numbers are better described as fast and loose. The company stands to net up to $16.7 million in a five-year period for a program that the Dallas Observer found has so little oversight that it's practically run on an honor system. The company uses its own scales, trucks and employees and enjoys such liberal reporting requirements that no one outside the company can say how much is really being collected or recycled. Community Waste Disposal claims that about 340 tons a year, or roughly 4 percent, of its collections aren't recycled, a figure far below nationwide averages. Most programs dump anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of what they collect, one expert says. . . .  Mike Nelson, a former Community Waste Disposal supervisor, says he remembers drivers going for blocks in poorer Dallas neighborhoods without seeing anything at the curb on recycling day. "South Dallas, what do you got? These people don't read the paper. The only thing they might set out is beer bottles," he says.  . . .

I am very excited about Bill Blaydes and hopefully Roxan Staff being on the next council.  These two people touch base with reality every morning.  From conversations we had during the campaign, Steve Salazar may be a better councilman this go round than in the six years he represented District 1.  

They will have to decide on these two issues within the next couple of months.  Are they going to go along with back-tracking on the council's commitment to the 5% for the police and firefighters?  Are they going to take a bad situation with our trash pickup and recycling program and make it worse?

Steve Salazar will represent a district where many groups are working to revitalize our respective neighborhoods.  If the city goes to quarterly big item pickups, our efforts will be in vain.  How do you clean up a neighborhood with old furniture sitting on the curb for 3 months?  

Veletta Lill represents East Dallas and controls Oak Lawn and Greenway Park.  There are few streets near Munger or Swiss where you can drive a block without seeing bulk trash that was set out by apartment managers or others.  It's no wonder this committee's report was held until after the May 3rd election.  

Paul Woodfield (practicaly unknown) got over 2,426 votes against Lill.  That's several hundred more than three candidates got who won their districts!

To live in a city, we must have order and sanitary conditions.  Cops and firefighters provide the order.  We need to keep our word and pay them their 5% on time with no delays.  We must pick up garbage and bulk trash as often as needed to keep our city clean.

Pick up trash before buying trashy art.

The Mayor and council have done enough harm to the morale of our sworn officers.  The least they can do is keep their word about the 2003 5% raise promised to the sworn officers.