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All politics is Local -- A story about a city near you
This blog was written when I was a city councilor in late 2005. Although some of the facts and figures are dated from my time on council the story in my mind still applies today and is a worthy metaphor for what is happening in our city.
The garbage truck was working its way down the back alley, picking up another week's worth of trash from the good citizens of Edmonton. Because of a particularly tight corner, made more difficult by the young kid's abandoned bicycle in the way, the driver had to back up. When he did he crushed one of the garbage cans he'd just emptied, mangling it between the big truck's bumper and a utility pole. The truck and the pole were fine. But the garbage can was destroyed. What happened next is an object lesson in why we need to remodel, revamp and rethink our form of city government.
Faced with this crumpled and flattened garbage can, the driver also was faced with a complex and difficult process to get the resident a replacement. It begins with Form 108-G, filled out with the details of the incident, signed by the driver and the resident, assuming the resident is home. The form goes to the shift supervisor, who checks to see that it's filled out correctly and that the facts are correct. The form proceeds to the department superintendent for final processing and then to accounting for the issuing of a credit for a replacement can. Total time from the back lane to the replacement: 11 working days. Total number of people involved in process: 4. Total man hours applied to meetings, forms and process: 6. Average hourly wage of personnel involved: $29.76. Total value of the garbage can in question: $14.99
It doesn't take much effort to think of a simpler, faster and far cheaper process. We could put one new can on each truck in case there was an incident, and just give it to the homeowner right then and there. Even in the unlikely event there were two crashes on a shift, it wouldn't take more than a few hours to find a nearby crew that still had its can on board. If there were more incidents than this, the supervisors and superintendents should be busy looking for new people, not filling out forms.
But that brings up another set of problems because it takes up to fifty days to hire a single employee. And it's become easier to promote a problem worker than to fire one. Now we're beginning to see that there are areas of the city's operations that require some adjustment.
We should muse on this example, not to point fingers at the garbage collectors or their administration, but to ask, "How can such a thing come to be? How has our city lost touch with us? Is there something fundamentally wrong in our thinking that allows, even encourages, such waste of precious resources?"
These are the questions city council needs to be asking because all politics is local. In seeing how the city wastes money on the small stuff one can get a picture of how the City may be wasting money on a larger scale.
These problems are not insurmountable but will take time and effort to resolve. Many of the people I have talked to in Ward 11 are asking City Council to do more with what they have. I think we can if we roll up our sleeves and look at our civic operations asking the simple question -- how can we do better?
Simple question -- tough to get straight answers -- but it has to be done. What do you think?

Website: http://www.MikeNickel.ca
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