A Maniac Killed My Garbage Can—and Changed My Mind About City Trash Service.
Why I’m Switching to City Garbage Collection
By Hans Wilder | The Watertown Post
Until this week, I never saw much reason to switch to the City of Watertown’s garbage service.
I had Pick N Go, and honestly, I never had much of a problem with the company. The holiday schedule could be annoying because one holiday sometimes pushed the entire week’s collection back a day, but I learned to live with it. Garbage collection is not supposed to be an exciting part of life. You put the can out, somebody empties it, and everyone moves on.
Then came early Monday morning.
Apparently, someone driving through Watertown decided that the shortest route to wherever he was going involved crossing my lawn, plowing into two of my garbage cans and dragging them several blocks down the road.
One minute I had garbage cans. The next minute, I had a debris field.
Trash was scattered along the street, the cans had disappeared, and somewhere out there was a vehicle being operated by either a very confused person or a maniac who had declared war on residential waste containers.
I did my best to pick everything up because I like to consider myself a good neighbor. Besides, if I did not pick it up, who would? The Garbage Fairy does not appear to cover Watertown.
I collected as much as I could, but the trail continued down the road. One of the cans had been crushed and carried so far away that I had no idea where it ended up.
I left a message with Pick N Go. I also contacted the Watertown Police Department and filed a report. That was not because I believed there was an organized conspiracy targeting my garbage. It was because somebody had driven across my property, destroyed equipment and scattered trash through the neighborhood. Law enforcement should probably know when a vehicle is traveling around Watertown taking out garbage cans like bowling pins.
The police later told me where the damaged cans had been found—several blocks away.
I passed that information along to Pick N Go. Their trucks travel through that same area and pass the intersection where the crushed container was sitting. The can had a large Pick N Go logo on the side of it. It was not exactly difficult to identify.
But their crew drove past it and left it there.
That is when my opinion changed.
This is not really an argument about whether private companies can collect garbage. Pick N Go collected mine for years without any major issue. The problem is what happens when something unusual occurs.
With a private company, I become the middleman. I have to call the police, obtain the report, contact the garbage company, explain what happened, send photographs, provide the location and hope everyone eventually communicates with everyone else.
Suddenly, I am operating a small claims department over a crushed plastic box filled with chicken bones and coffee grounds.
With city garbage service, there is at least a paper trail inside the same government. The police department documents the incident. The Department of Public Works handles the garbage service. One city department can communicate with another city department without requiring me to become the United Nations ambassador for missing trash cans.
If a city-owned container were destroyed by a vehicle, the city would have access to the police report showing that I did not lose it, sell it, hide it or launch it into the Black River. The city could retrieve the damaged container, replace it and record what happened.
That kind of accountability matters.
City garbage collection also keeps an essential public service connected to the government responsible for keeping the streets clean. When garbage is scattered across a neighborhood, it is no longer merely a disagreement between a resident and a private contractor. It becomes a public sanitation problem.
So, after years of being perfectly satisfied with private collection, I have changed my mind.
I am switching to city garbage service.
Not because Pick N Go never collected my trash. They did. Not because I have suddenly become emotionally attached to municipal garbage trucks. I have not.
I am switching because when something goes wrong—and eventually something always goes wrong—it makes more sense to have the police report, the damaged container, the collection crew and the responsibility all under the same municipal roof.
Sometimes city government is inefficient. Sometimes private business is inefficient. But when a crazed driver launches your garbage cans halfway across Watertown, you quickly discover the value of having everyone involved working from the same paper trail.
That is how I became a supporter of city garbage collection.
It was not ideology.
It was vehicular trash-can demolition.
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