Trash Talk

If you live in H-Town and rely on the city to pick up your black and green bins, most likely you are encountering delays.  Here is from a front-page story in today’s Chron hard copy:

For the last few months, Juan Sorto and his neighbors have looked toward the curb on Thursdays and asked themselves the same uneasy question: Did the garbage trucks come?

Last week, they had. The week before, they had not, according to Sorto. What is supposed to be a routine, weekly service has turned into a more haphazard enterprise in Sorto’s corner of northeast Houston, near Tidwell and Mesa. Sorto said his subdivision’s black bins often have been skipped entirely this year. His neighbors have started storing garbage in their recycling carts, with some spilling out into drainage ditches.

“There’s been times where we’ve gone more than a week without it getting picked up,” said Sorto, a former chair of the city’s Super Neighborhood Alliance. The Solid Waste Management Department said it checked its records and confirmed trucks had been through the neighborhood, but it would monitor the neighborhood more carefully in the future.

Here is the entire read: Houston’s trash trucks are constantly behind schedule. Why? (houstonchronicle.com).

The article goes on to say that the city will look at a garbage fee option.  I don’t know about that. A lot of folks are still feeling the effects of a hike in our water rates.

Commentary lives in the Heights. We probably have one of the better voter turnouts in the city. I hate to say this, but we are going to get attention when it comes to city services.  Our weekly black bins get picked up on the same day. There have been no delays.  Our green bin gets picked up every other week. It is supposed to be picked up on a Thursday.  These days it gets picked up a day late on Friday.  Up until a few weeks ago, it would sit out there for a couple of days.

According to today’s article, the city doesn’t have enough drivers. Trash pick-up is a basic core city service. Pay the drivers a lot more. We should not have to be dealing with this. This should be a priority that needs to be solved.

_____

The A’s and Astros are the only teams who still not have played a home game this season. Both have their home openers this evening.

We went 5-4 on the road to open the season. There is nothing wrong with that.

The MLB.com power rankings by Alyson Footer have us at number 4 this morning.

Let’s play ball.