By Hans Wilder | The Watertown Post
I really don’t like writing about Watertown City Hall. Quite frankly, I find it boring, repetitive and usually a waste of time. You can sit through meetings, listen to studies, hear about committees, watch another consultant get brought in and then wait patiently while everybody explains why something either can’t be done or has to be done at the speed of a glacier. That is one of the reasons I usually stay away from City Hall coverage. There are more interesting things happening in Northern New York than watching government manage decline one agenda item at a time.
The sad part is that Watertown actually has a really good product. If you took this city, polished it up, put it on a golden platter and presented it properly to certain companies around the United States and around the world, they would eat it up like it was the best cake they had ever been served. Watertown has Fort Drum sitting practically next door, Interstate 81, an airport, abundant water, comparatively inexpensive land, access to power, proximity to Canada and the Great Lakes, an existing downtown, established neighborhoods and a strategic location that most cities our size would kill to have.
Yet somehow Watertown continues to think small.
That is the problem. The mentality is small. The vision is small. Sometimes it feels like City Hall is staffed politically by RINOs whose primary mission is not to build a growing city, but to competently manage a shrinking one. Maintain what we have, patch a pothole, raise a fee, order another study and make sure nothing becomes too exciting. It is dinosaur thinking. Caveman-brain municipal government in an era when cities should be thinking about artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, defense technology, energy, logistics, data centers and the industries that will define the next twenty years.
My adventure trying to pay a $91 garbage bill this week is a small example of that larger mentality.
I thought I was enrolled in automatic payment for my city garbage tote. I wasn’t, and I’ll take responsibility for that. My mistake. But I also understand exactly how I ended up thinking I was enrolled, because the city does not make this stuff nearly as straightforward as it should be. Watertown offers an automatic ACH program, but it requires a separate enrollment process and banking documentation instead of simply allowing a resident to log into a modern account, click “autopay,” enter the necessary information and be done with it.
The city’s own website says its refuse totes are billed quarterly. A 32-gallon tote currently costs $91 per quarter, and the city warns that if payment is not received by the due date, service can be interrupted. Before service is restarted, the entire quarterly payment must be made along with an additional $50 tote re-delivery fee.
I didn’t know I owed the $91 because I believed I was already on automatic payment. Then I walked outside and discovered that my garbage tote was gone. Apparently that was my notification.
Once I figured out what had happened, I did what any normal person in 2026 would do. I went to the City of Watertown website to pay the bill. The city specifically advertises online payment for trash-tote bills using eCheck, Visa, Mastercard, Discover and debit cards.
Except the link did not work properly for me.
I have the video.
That is what makes this more irritating. I wasn’t refusing to pay the bill. I wasn’t sitting home waiting for the city to track me down. Once I realized there was a problem, I went directly to the city website and attempted to give them their money. The digital system that is supposed to make that possible failed during my attempt, so I ended up doing something that increasingly feels like visiting a museum exhibit.
I went to City Hall.
City Hall is undergoing a substantial construction project right now, and from what I could see they appear to be doing a good job with it. I have no objection to fixing up the building. It is an important public building and it should be maintained properly. But somebody in local government needs to understand that for most residents, the city website is City Hall now.
That website is the front door.
People use it to pay taxes, pay water bills, pay garbage bills, find forms, check schedules, get phone numbers and figure out what government wants from them. You can spend a pile of money renovating the physical building, but if the digital front door is confusing, cumbersome or fails when somebody is trying to pay a bill, then you are pouring money into one entrance while leaving the entrance most people actually use stuck somewhere around 2004.
So I went upstairs to pay my garbage bill and get my tote back. Because service had already been interrupted, I also had to pay the additional $50 re-delivery fee. The city’s published policy does, in fact, impose that charge, so whether I like it or not, it is there in black and white.
My $91 garbage bill had suddenly become $141.
There went a couple of decent pizzas.
Then I pulled out my debit card.
Nope.
I was told I would need cash or a check. That is particularly absurd when the city’s own website tells residents they can use a debit or credit card to pay trash-tote bills online, while the comptroller’s FAQ says credit cards are accepted through the online payment system rather than directly at the office.
So think about that situation for a moment. The online payment route had failed when I tried to use it, and when I physically appeared inside City Hall with a debit card ready to pay the city, that apparently wasn’t an option either. At that point paying a garbage bill was beginning to feel less like a financial transaction and more like a scavenger hunt.
I told the employee that I thought the system was stupid and that the city needed to seriously up its game. She did not appreciate my assessment.
She remained seated across the office rather than coming to the counter while we were speaking. My hearing is not particularly good, and people who know me know that I can sometimes talk louder than I realize, especially when I am trying to hear somebody talking to me from across a room. At some point I was warned that if I did not tone it down the police could be called.
I continued talking in what I considered my normal voice, and when I saw her moving toward the telephone, I made the executive decision that my garbage tote had already consumed enough of my morning. The last thing I needed was to turn a $91 garbage bill into an episode that ended up on the Watertown Nosy Neighbors page.
So I left City Hall, walked over to the bank, got cash and went back.
This time I went to the third floor and explained the situation to the City Manager’s Office. Watertown’s current city manager is Eric Wagenaar, whose office oversees the general administration of city operations, financial affairs and municipal resources.
I want to give credit where credit is due. Wagenaar and his staff handled the situation professionally. Someone was sent with me so I could go back downstairs, pay the bill and finally put an end to the Great Watertown Garbage Expedition of 2026.
Thank you to Eric Wagenaar and his staff for helping straighten it out.
I also think somebody should provide a little additional customer-service training downstairs. A taxpayer who shows up aggravated because the website didn’t work and because his garbage tote disappeared is probably not going to walk into City Hall sounding like he just won a cruise. Government employees deal with the public, and occasionally that public is going to be frustrated. That comes with the territory.
But this story really isn’t about one employee, one garbage tote or even the $50 fee. It is about a mindset that shows itself in little ways all over government.
Watertown should be thinking bigger.
This city should be aggressively marketed to companies looking for exactly the combination of assets that Watertown and Jefferson County possess. Defense contractors should know this city. Advanced manufacturers should know this city. Data-center developers should know this city. Energy companies should know this city. Logistics companies should know this city. Companies looking for proximity to Fort Drum should be receiving polished presentations explaining exactly why Watertown makes sense.
The sales pitch practically writes itself. We have one of the most important Army installations in the Northeast. We have Interstate 81 running directly through the region. We have an airport. We have water. We have affordable land compared with larger metropolitan areas. We have a downtown with redevelopment potential, an existing workforce, access to Canada and a location within reach of Syracuse and the larger Great Lakes economy.
Those are assets.
Yet instead of aggressively packaging those assets and presenting Watertown as a city positioned for the next American industrial expansion, too much local government thinking seems focused on maintaining the status quo and managing decline.
That is where I use the term RINO. I am not talking about whether somebody has an R or a D after their name on a ballot. I am talking about a governing mentality that claims to be fiscally responsible and business friendly while showing very little appetite for the kind of bold growth that could completely change Watertown’s trajectory.
Watertown does not need more people explaining why things are difficult. Every successful company, city and country on Earth faces difficult problems. The difference is that successful organizations look at those problems and ask how to get around them, over them or straight through them.
The next twenty years are going to bring enormous changes in American manufacturing, artificial intelligence, energy production, defense technology, robotics and logistics. Communities that position themselves now could experience enormous growth. Communities that spend those same twenty years debating garbage tote procedures and conducting studies about why nothing can be done will look around someday and wonder where everybody went.
That is why something as ridiculous as my garbage-payment adventure actually matters.
Government systems tell you something about how government thinks. When a simple transaction requires a resident to navigate an online system, discover the payment route isn’t working, physically travel to City Hall, learn that his debit card cannot solve the problem there, walk to a bank for cash, return to City Hall and ultimately involve the City Manager’s Office just to get a garbage tote back, that is not merely an inconvenience. It is a symptom of an institution that has allowed simple things to become unnecessarily complicated.
The city employees actually collecting the garbage deserve credit. From my experience, the crews out there doing the physical work are doing their jobs. My complaint is not with the guy driving the garbage truck. My complaint is with the administrative structure surrounding a service that should be almost invisible to the customer.
Pay the bill. Put out the tote. Garbage disappears. Everybody goes on with life.
That is what good government should feel like.
Watertown already has the hard part. It has the location. It has the infrastructure. It has Fort Drum. It has history. It has water. It has land. It has transportation. It has a recognizable downtown and a community worth investing in.
What it desperately needs is a bigger imagination.
If Watertown was presented properly on a golden platter to the right investors and companies, somebody would take one look at what we have here and wonder why the rest of the country hasn’t figured it out yet.
The problem is not the product.
The product is damn good.
The problem is that too many people responsible for selling it still seem to think like they are running a declining little upstate city that should be grateful merely to survive another year.
Watertown can do better than that.
And maybe the first baby step toward thinking like a modern, growing city would be figuring out how to let somebody pay his garbage bill without turning it into an afternoon adventure.
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