Only weeks after taking office, Perkins
announced his support for a garbage collection tax. Currently, the city
provides the service free for payers of sewerage and water fees, amounts which
have seen a large increase over the past several years to fund federal
government-ordered updating and improvement. Almost all cities charge
separately for basic trash pickup.
That operation has seen a decline in the last few
years, first with a significant portion of it sidelined with Bossier City’s
decision to decouple from Shreveport in this effort in favor of private
provision. More recently, the city has had greater difficulty in keeping the
scaled-down enterprise fully staffed because of relatively low wages, with the
embarrassment that the departing workers fled to Bossier City’s provider.
Worse, with Bossier
City changing its providers to one that doesn’t use Shreveport’s landfill,
that means a hit of over $1 million annually to city revenues.
Thus, Perkins declared a fee of $18 monthly should alleviate this difficulty, if not allow rebuild reserves. But he didn’t seem interested in pursuing what Bossier City did, outsourcing, despite that fact that history has shown typically privatization saves money, if not improves service as well.
Perkins, as did many observers, during the mayoral
campaign lamented mediocre economic growth in Shreveport as the city continues
to lose population. Reinvigorating it calls for putting development first,
which should focus on letting people keep more of what they earn to plow back
into the economy because they can do so more efficiently than can government,
and then jobs and people will follow. Yet automatically defaulting to
continuing an expensive city service in the same manner as always forgoes a
chance to accomplish this. Saving government jobs before all else misses the
point.
Likely, contracting to the private sector would
not have saved the entire $8 million or so in trash pickup costs — although the
Perkins plan would raise an estimated $14 million, begging the question of why
he shouldn’t price it closer to $12 a month. However, doing that almost
certainly would cost less than $18 per month, and maybe only half of that.
If Perkins wants to turn around Shreveport’s
economic fortunes, he needs to take a serious look at privatization, which has
worked well in Bossier City. Should he not, the new City Council needs to push
him in that direction.
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