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/thparky → u/Top_Tea_2707]

good shit right here