So, remember what I was saying on Friday about the inequity that’s built into our current sanitation system?

Looks like we city residents will have to live with it for at least another year.

I got some great comments about Friday’s piece from folks who were challenging my assumptions about the connection between income level, consumption level and level of trash production with their own assumptions about the relationship of income level and the quality of items consumed.   I fear that my attempts to inject a social justice aspect to the argument may have obscured the basic, well-known and easy to defend point about the economic unfairness of our current “all you can eat” sanitation system.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s again base these arguments on the wage tax since it is the dominant revenue source for the city and, as a flat tax, is easy to calculate.  The fairness argument can be made even if we hold that income levels, and therefore wage tax levels, are equal when comparing two different trash producers.  The EPA makes the equity point very easily:

Equity - One of the most important advantages of a variable-rate program may be its inherent fairness. When the cost of managing trash is hidden in taxes or charged at a flat rate, residents who recycle and prevent waste subsidize their neighbors’ wastefulness. Under PAYT, residents pay only for what they throw away.

More than anything, this episode seems to be a case of being unable to frame the debate in way that leads people to the conclusion that PAYT is at least the “least worst” option.  Councilman Jim Kenney made that point in a roundabout kind of way in this Inky piece about the death of PAYT:

At-large Councilman James F. Kenney, a Nutter ally who opposed the trash fee, said the open nature of this year’s budget process might have doomed the proposal from the start.

“You need a chance internally to work through things sometimes before it becomes public. If it goes public and you don’t have all the answers yet, all of a sudden you’re fielding complaints and phone calls from constituents and you don’t have anything to tell them,” Kenney said.

He predicted Nutter would have had a difficult sell had the mayor tried to push the trash fee through Council.

It’s an important point.

The first thing we heard about “Pay As You Throw” came out in the run up to the citizen budget workshops and it was a loosely defined and very mutable theory that was designed to serve as a starting point, not the finished product.  The problem, however, is that the starting point assumed that most Philadelphians had a handle on many of the larger issues at play and were well versed in many best practices.  That, obviously, was not the case.  The starting point should have been an educational discussion about the sanitation process including the following:

1. The city should have brought “what do my taxes pay for?” question.  They could have demonstrated that for the typical Philadelphian, whose wage taxes as a percentage of income have gone down since 1996, and whose property tax rate and sales tax rate have remained the same, their taxes have actually gone in larger chunks towards the pension and health care benefits of the person picking up the trash which means less and less for the landfill fees, truck maintenance, equipment purchasing, street sweeping and just about every other non-personnel cost you can think of.

2. Having established that less of the typical Philadelphian’s tax dollar is actually going to the landfill fees, the city could then have explained that more trash=higher landfill fees.  And those higher landfill fees can’t be avoided.  Homer Simpson may have had the great idea of stuffing all of the trash in the old abandoned Springfield mine, but we don’t have many places to illegally stash the trash quietly.  Anyway, higher landfill fees then mean less money for things like libraries and parks and swimming pools.  You know, the fun stuff.  If your neighbor throws out a ton of trash, it doesn’t matter how little you throw out, your library is still at risk

3. Once those connections are established, it would not take much to get people to make the final leap to the equity issue on their own and generate enough citizen unrest over the current system so that they’re practically begging for the pay-as-your-throw system.  Take a page out of Philadelphia Forward’s book which has gone a long way to making it a maxim that the property tax system - from assessment to millage - is unfair and broken.  At this point, it’s a given and while this hasn’t (yet) resulted in a fix in the way real estate taxes are levied, that’s only because they are a lot more complex than the simple problem of connecting the cost of trash to the production of trash.

4. Having gotten the above three messages out, citizen input mixed with a menu of best practices from other cities could then have been used to answer the question: “How do we get people to throw away less trash and how do we pay for the trash that we do toss?”  Rather than, as Kenney points out above, “We’re going to make you pay for your trash in some way that we haven’t exactly figured out, what do you think about that?” (followed up with a wet willy.)

Clearly, time was a factor here just like it was when the city had to put together a rapid response to the gaping hole in their FY2009 budget back in the fall.  But that doesn’t leave them off the hook entirely since it’s clear that they’ve been thinking about this idea since at least the summer time.   If the proper foundation had been laid with a healthy civic discussion as outlined above, the $100 million solution that could have actually improved collection of trash, sweeping of streets and removal of litter might not have been pitched like yesterday’s garbage.

Ok.  I refuse to talk about trash anymore.  If the city doesn’t want to recycle this, I’m not going to waste any time.  We’ll just put this in the dust bin of good ideas and bring it out of the can for next year’s budget.  It’s time for me to get back to other issues that are more my bag.  Feel free to comment and I’ll continue this discussion in the thread below but no more posts out of me.