No Trash Pickup For You!

From the Times-Picayune:

The mound of rotted drywall and moldy planks piled recently outside the wrecked house in Algiers looked more or less identical to the countless heaps that have littered the New Orleans landscape since Hurricane Katrina.
But as volunteers with the Episcopal Diocese's disaster response team soon learned, this batch of gutted debris bore one important difference: Unlike the piles they had tirelessly deposited on curbsides across town during the past two years, a trash crew would not be coming to pick up this one.

The heap festered for days as complaints rolled in from neighbors, including a mom who said her toddler had tried to jump into the garbage, said Katie Mears, director of the church's recovery office.

The diocese ended up paying $600 to have the pile hauled away, a considerable sum for a charity whose work also includes rehabbing houses.

"It comes out of rebuild money, which is what's terrible about it," Mears said. "It's what we would be using to buy Sheetrock and paint."

Because of wrangling over contract clauses between the the city officials and waste disposal companies, folks who gut their ruined houses will have to haul their own trash away, or pay to have it done. The piles are taller than people, sometimes as tall as the houses, and they stretch from one end of the property to the other. They are filled with dangerous materials.

In signing the deals last year, Mayor Ray Nagin vowed that the steeper cost was worth the improved services to usher in a new era of cleanliness along New Orleans' notoriously litter-strewn streets.

But city officials in recent weeks admit they are not requiring the vendors to collect curbside debris discarded from gutting and rebuilding projects, debris that would seem to meet the broad definition outlined in their contracts.

Instead, they're holding the companies to more lenient standards spelled out in the city building code and in an ordinance adopted in April -- five months after the deals were signed -- that saddle residents with the responsibility of hauling away all but the most trivial amounts of construction waste.

I have said repeatedly that every level of government failed the people of New Orleans from the beginning, and that's still true. Whatever progress the city makes in recovering will be mainly due to the efforts of the citizens and volunteers.

I don't understand how the people of New Orleans voted to reelect Ray Nagin, who had already proved himself incompetent. What were they thinking? Maybe now they know better, but it's too late.

You can read the whole sorry tale of the city officials and the companies booting responsibility back and forth with the end result that no one is responsible, and the citizens must do it themselves. Sad.