Philadelphia is in the middle of a budget crisis (a projected $1 billion deficit, to be exact), and our mayor is looking for solutions before unveiling his budget later this month. His latest idea is to charge city residents per bag of trash, and we would have to buy special garbage bags (at $1-2 each) from the city. There's an article about it here.
According to the mayor's office, this is something that is done in seven thousand other municipalities across the country. Nonetheless, I could write an extensive list of all the reasons why I think this is a bad idea (let's start with the fact that my entire apartment building uses one dumpster--how the hell are you going to enforce that? And are you just going to leave the trash there to rot if someone does not use the special bags?). Though I'd likely have a bit of an edge due to my obsessive recycling and plans for a compost, I'd honestly rather have my taxes raised than have to have buy my garbage bags from a bureaucracy. It's hard enough just to get a driver's license here.
2 comments:
Don't they do that in OC? My parents have been buying "blue bags" for years now. Still, seems like there must be a better way....
I wasn't aware that they did it in OC. . . I'm not aware of either of my parents buying bags there. In any case, I don't doubt that it works in some places, but I just don't see it happening in Philly (you should see the problem that we have with trash already). And $1-2 per bag seems like an awful lot to ask in the middle of a recession.
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