Trash collection and charter reform

One side effect of consuming Cointreau at midnight is a certain tendency to free-associate.  So it is that a question that Shelley of The Menagerie posed at lunch today (a prize for my knack at formulating queries to Google and deriving Jane Austen as the answer) sparked an association of ideas this evening.

Shelley asked me why (as she put it) Portland’s garbage collection system is so screwed up.  I thought about it and said (summarizing) that most of the system is the way it is because the City and Metro didn’t want to mess too much with the modus vivendi that the garbage haulers had worked out among themselves years before.

This brought to mind the new website sponsored by b!X to discuss rewriting Portland’s charter, to which he’s invited me to contribute.  Like the garbage system, Portland’s charter grew by accretion rather than by design.  More precisely, the charter was the result of design, but over the years bits and pieces have been attached, like barnacles on a ship, and today’s charter is not all that efficient.  (I’m not persuaded that cities should be efficient at making decisions; sometimes inaction is the best policy.)

The guts of a garbage collection system are simple.  I put refuse in a container, and from time to time someone comes and takes the container’s contents away so that I never see the contents again.  But the devil is in the details (not, as I had once thought, in Queens), and the refinements aren’t simple.  Who, exactly, is going to take the garbage away?  Do I get to choose who takes my garbage away?  What commission does the hauler have to give the government to get permission to take my garbage away?  Where does the garbage go?  How much work should I have to do to sort my garbage before it’s taken away?  And how much should we change the system that grew up, unplanned, before the government got involved?

So it is with the City charter.  We have the last remaining big-city commission government — that is, a city council where the councilors are assigned to administer specific bureaux at the discretion of the mayor, a remnant of the time nearly a century ago when our elected officials were expected to be administrators and not just makers of policy.  Let’s say we want to remake the system.  What happens if we collectively decide that we don’t need a city council?  The fact is that we have a city council and five councilors already, and any revamping of the city charter is likely to preserve those positions.  (Thirty years ago, when the city and county explored consolidation as an efficiency measure, the idea proposed to the voters was that the ten city councilors and county commissioners would be replaced by eleven councilors of the consolidated organization — no obvious efficiency there.)  It seems to me that the first question the city has to deal with in giving an assignment to a charter review committee is to say whether the committee starts with a blank slate — anything goes — or whether the committee merely gets to propose changes to today’s basic system.

I’d like to see all ideas up for debate, even ideas as wild as electing the mayor in the same manner that the church elects the Pope.  Let’s not rule anything out.