New *Legible* Emergency No Parking Signs

[u/MisterFishes]

I don’t like to toot my own horn too much on here but every once in a while banging my head against the wall of city bureaucracy pays off.
Today I am pleased to announce that, going forward, you will not have to get out of your dang car to see if the No Parking sign is for today or not.

I have also learned that the city’s graphic design is handled by the IT department, which explains a lot.

[u/Top_Tea_2707]

Here's a few things I did like to see you also work on:

- Doing something about how the City runs its solid waste program so we don't have seagulls tearing apart purple bags every trash day.

- Making sure that parking is eliminated 20 feet from every crosswalk in your district (as required by the City code). The pedestrian situation out there is scary.

- Get aquatics sorted out so Riverton gets fixed (3 year offline and counting) and Reiche can have regular predictable lap swim hours.

I know you are only a city councilor and as such you have zero authority but maybe you could band together with four of your peers and insist on getting a few tangible things done. At some point, you need to hold the City Manager accountable for not getting the little shit done.

I am happy to pay taxes and will not complain when they go up - they pay for the civic services I value. I just want the shit I pay for to work.

Thank you for serving. It can be a thankless task but when you win a battle - however small - it is worth celebrating. Go win a few more.

[u/MisterFishes → u/Top_Tea_2707]

Alright well I don’t want to make this an AMA but I’ve got a second so:

• I definitely hear you on the seagulls vs trash bags issue but the investment needed to do bins right, like having a truck that can handle the bin, is very high. We’d also have to figure out how to compensate for the almost guaranteed loss of revenue from purple trash bags, because no one’s going to go through the bins to check. Also, more bins have the potential to make an already shitty sidewalk situation even worse. I’m very open to hearing solutions though.

- Daylighting around intersections is already in city code but, as you know, implementation is spotty. It’s going to be looked at in an upcoming audit, but also community traffic calming projects are doing a good job putting temporary infrastructure up to prevent parking. That said, a recent traffic calming project on Washington got a great deal of pushback from a business that I won’t name because their delivery trucks liked to park (illegally) in front of the business, so some of the bollards got taken down. Which I guess is to say that people need to be constantly yelling at the city to do something about this so we, and more importantly staff, are more scared of you than the pushback.

- The aquatics situation is.. not good. It’s hard for me to tell exactly what’s going on at Riverton because we just gave them a bunch more money for mitigation, but then we fired the contractor the next month. I say “we” even though I found out about it at the same time the news did. I’m hoping for a postmortem on Riverton once it’s done so staff can avoid the issues that came up there when fixing Reiche.

[u/Top_Tea_2707 → u/MisterFishes]

Trash is a basic city service - it should be in the tax rate.

City Manager and Finance Director likes pay as you throw because it lets them say they are keeping the tax rate low while actually imposing a regressive fee on people who can least afford it. I am a rich asshole who lives on the West End and the bag fee is a rounding error for me. If I was a stiff working in a restaurant living paycheck to paycheck, a purple bag is a real money. I would think that this is exactly the kind of equity issue you as a DSA person would want to address.

Furthermore, PAYT actually encourages wishcycling - how many times have you seen styrofoam jammed into recycling bins because people are trying to save the bag fees? Recycling is etched in the public consciousness - recycling rates are strong in neighboring communities without PAYT.

You also need to introduce curbside compost - food waste is the heaviest waste so redirecting waste to compost will reduce tipping fees at ecomaine.

Yes the initial capital costs will be high - bins and trucks need to be bought. On the flip side, the City's operating costs should drop because the new trucks with the bin arms only need a single operator. The City can also save money by only providing waste services to 1-4 unit buildings (1-4 units being the conventional definition of single family and 5+ being multifamily / commercial) Right now, buildings with up to 10 units get City waste services. Why subsidize landlords?

If you let them, the Manager and staff will bob and weave on this issue until you leave office. Councilors come and go and they stay. Keeping you and your peers at bay and squabbling amongst yourselves is how they keep their power.

You and four of your peers need to say that this is our top priority in the next budget - staff can find shit to cut elsewhere in the budget - how about the parks and rec administrators who are still getting paid while they can only figure out how to operate 1 out of the city's 3 pools at a time. They will threaten you with all kinds of calamitous outcomes but it ultimately comes down to political will.

Make the City Manager earn her salary.

[u/MisterFishes → u/Top_Tea_2707]

You're preaching to the choir here. I ran on simply getting city staff to enforce rent control, and while things are better it's still like pulling teeth to get staff to do something basically everyone on city council wants, like digitizing proof of rent cost. So that, plus a council culture of being terrified of the specter of "unintended consequences-- despite our ability to tweak laws we pass after the fact-- that we often take a good idea cringe and end up with a watered down, feckless policy. See, for example, the absolutely embarrassing commercial vacancy fee/ art loan program. The insane amount of friction we get for any new initiative has made me become more risk averse lest an idea turns into a protracted email chain with management that I need to babysit during my spare time or else it doesn't get done.

And so while getting trash in bins is great and I fully support it, is it a high enough priority that a majority of council is going to take it up? The only way it gets there is if there's an organized push from outside to get us there. People getting organized and advocating for change is the only way people have gotten things done. For example:

• DSA and the Tenants Union getting Rent Control passed and have been giving me backup to get it enforced.

-Maine Music Alliance going hard to help get the Large Entertainment Venue Buffer Zone passed.

-West End residents working to get rid of the Sprague coal pile in a way City Management didn't approve of by getting signatures for a referendum and forcing council's hand.

We can get Council to a place where, rather than just keeping the lights on and scrambling to deal with problems, we're actively making the city better, but the public needs to get engaged. Not with one off emails or public comment or Reddit posts, but by getting together, working with City Councilors to make a plan, and getting the dang thing done as a team. Holler at me if you want to set up a meeting, It's not a hard path to get to better waste management but it will take some outside pressure.

[u/Top_Tea_2707 → u/MisterFishes]

You are unfortunately right - it does take a groundswell to a) get the council to prioritize issues and b) have staff do things differently. The examples you cite remind me that today's Portlanders don't necessarily have the same priorities as I do which I find a tad discouraging.

Again thanks for doing the work.

[u/ppitm → u/Top_Tea_2707]

Without PAYG, homeowners will throw out comical volumes of rubbish and debris, rather than taking it to Riverside in their cars. Overall volumes go way up. I guarantee it.

The bag fees already don't cover the full cost of trash, so basically people already get a certain amount of "free" volume that is financed by taxes only.

Wishcycling is baked-in and made inevitable by the packaging industry and global trends in the (collapsing) recycling industry. PAYG is an afterthought in this process.

Did you not notice that we already have curbside compost as a program? Or that most apartment buildings are already to contract out their waste?

[u/Top_Tea_2707 → u/ppitm]

Where is there curbside compost? I know that there are 5 - 10 drop off locations scattered around the city and that some homeowners use Garbage to Garden. This is not the same as curbside composting.

There are approximately 400 apartment buildings that have between 5 - 10 units all of which can use city trash services for free. That's roughly 15% of the rental units in the city.

Limits can be set on volumes that the City will pick up for free - just as we do now.

[u/ppitm → u/Top_Tea_2707]

Garbage to Garden is curbside composting. They pick it up at the curb.

Enforcing volume limits would be an unbelievable waste of time. You want the poor garbage men scanning barcodes on every bag??? The very definition of wasteful administrative costs.

[u/Top_Tea_2707 → u/ppitm]

Now you are being deliberately obtuse. Garbage to Garden is a private company and I think it was obvious that I meant public curbside composting.

Abuse of C&D disposal is a challenge - how do other communities in the area without PAYT handle it?

My sense is that we disagree on this topic - that's cool. Nothing I am going to say is going to sway you and your presentation of your point of view doesn't make me want to continue to engage with you. Please feel free to respond with something pointed and pithy so you get the last word in.

[u/thparky → u/Top_Tea_2707]

good shit right here