Skip the Noise, Reconsider Basics on Trash Talk

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It’s been a bunch of rigmarole ever since calls cropped up for a new system on trash hauling in Los Angeles.

The idea seemed to be that city officials should carve out a number of franchise territories for hauling trash from businesses and mid-sized and large apartment buildings.

One of the stated goals was to bring more order to the process, which previously had numerous private operators running garbage trucks willy-nilly throughout our neighborhoods.

The proposal for franchises – essentially geographic monopolies to be awarded by elected officials – drew full-throated opposition from some in the community of business, including more than a few owners of larger apartment complexes. The real idea behind the franchise program, some of them claimed, was to replace dozens of mostly smaller trash haulers with a handful of large, deep-pocketed entities, thereby giving unions a better chance at organizing the industry’s labor force.

We can’t say how any efforts might be going on the labor front – but we can report that the noisy back-and-forth continues over trash-hauling, a service that is the generally deemed to be the responsibility of the city, even if it has chosen to fulfill its obligation through third-party contractors.

The din is almost enough to make us forget that it’s been more than three years since the effort to get the franchise program through the City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office started.

Or that it’s only taken three months since the actual debut of the program for the fallout to stack up, starting with some serious snafus in service that left heaps of garbage to stink in the summer heat, and more recently including the outrage of commercial property owners – especially owners of apartment complexes – who feel walloped as the rates they pay have about doubled in many cases.

It’s familiar theater, and you can pick your own villains and heroes.

We’ll remind you, in any case, that trash hauling is a basic service and key element of public health.

It’s also a fairly familiar industry, which makes it hard for us to see how something that’s relatively knowable – the cost of hauling the trash – could come as such an apparent surprise to so many.

You can read about the latest proposal to address the concerns of commercial property owners on page 3 – and decide for yourself whether it amounts to little more than a bandage on what look to be a broken policy and poor policy-making practices.

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