Who knew Trash was a hot topic

I had no idea that garbage, local trash pickup, could be such a hot topic. You see, I am a district delegate in my community association. Yeah, I'm in politics, local politics, as an elected volunteer. My community association is the biggest HOA (home owners association) in the USA, which is split up into delegates who report to the board of directors.

Anyways, there are a lot of topics that come up in our meetings. Police enforcement issues, where to place new stop lights, spending millions on a new recreation center, and a lot of other topics that would take too long to talk about. Among all of the issues, the most heated discussions are about garbage! Who knew?

My city is serviced by several different garbage companies. We wanted competition in our trash pickup services, giving residents the choice of several providers. Competition is great...isn't it? I always thought so. But several residents have complained that, "there are too many garbage trucks on the road!"

What happens is that several garbage trucks, one from each company, can be seen on the roads two days a week (garbage pickup is limited to Mondays and Thursdays only). In communities that have one garbage company, only one garbage truck goes down the streets. See what those residents are getting at? They don't want the competition, all they want is less trucks on the road. Maybe because my daughter isn't old enough to play street hockey I haven't ever noticed the trucks. Well, that's not true. When I skip work and sleep in, which is more often than I want my employer to know, I have been woken up several times in the morning by several noisy garbage trucks.

So what issues are involved in this? Hopefully with the competition we are getting the best prices possible, but have to put up with more trucks. If we limit the service, the price could go up, but there would be less trucks. Seems like it should be an easy decision. But in the meetings, one of the questions that keeps coming up is, "what do you guys (us elected officials) get out of this?" Nothing! How many times do we have to tell the residents this, "this is not a conspiracy. We aren't going to be driving luxury cars after we make the decision." But it keeps coming up. We only started researching this topic because several residents complained about too many trucks, but now they think is some sort of conspiracy for us to get a Lexus or something. Give me a break! At the end of the meeting the head of the research committee shouted, "If you want conspiracy, go see an Oliver Stone movie!"

Well, that's politics. I should have known things like this were bound to come up. Does anyone care that we are spending millions of dollars to build a state-of-the-art recreation center? Or that we just voted to spend $50,000 to update less than ten pieces of exercise equipment at one of our other recreation centers? Of course not, we have to spend six months researching the garbage issue. Oh well.