City councilor: Make slobs pay for cleaning up their messes in neighborhood business districts
City Councilor Matt O'Malley (Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury) says clean business districts are better and even safer business districts and wants to look at increasing fines on "chronic" litterers.
At a City Council meeting today, O'Malley said Boston's maximum littering fines are only $25, compared to $300 in New York and $1,500 in Chicago.
O'Malley also wants to look at expanding the city "hokey" program, in which workers with trash bins on wheels go around business districts cleaning up and introducing new technolgy, such as the sort of "binless bins" the T uses for recycling newspapers.
Separately, Councilor Sal LaMattina (East Boston, Charlestown, North End) wants a hearing on reducing the hours residents of certain downtown neighborhoods are allowed to put trash out on the street. Currently, residents in neighborhoods such as the North End can put trash out at 5 p.m. for pickup starting at 7 a.m. the following morning.
That's 14 or more hours in which pickers and rats can rip the bags open, spreading waste over the street, he said. Changing the earliest time to 6 a.m., with pickup after 9 a.m., could dramatically reduce the odds of trash being spread all over, he said.
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Wow they be talking some
Wow they be talking some sense. What's next? Actually charging market rate at parking meters and market rate parking tickets?
Welcome to the 1990s Boston!
Yawn... hijacking this thread
Yawn... hijacking this thread again to push the anti-car agenda. Get a purpose in life. Try volunteer work.
Anti-car?
I'm pretty sure that market rate parking is not anti-car, but pro-economic development. High car turnover is good for business, after all, and it provides more funds for keeping roads in a good state of repair.
Unless, of course, you're implying that we should all get down and kiss the ground that you walk on and provide you with subsidies for your personal vehicle usage.
Anti-car would be saying "remove all parking!" or "charge ABOVE market rate for parking!"...
"Market rate" parking meters
"Market rate" parking meters doesn't even make sense. The city sets the rate, therefore the meters are at market rate.
Warped point of view
You have a very poor understanding of what market rate is, don't you?
Pass a trash receptacle city ordinance...
Pass a trash barrel city ordinance requiring any place of business which sells litter producing products (convince store / fast food / packie / etc.) be required to provide and maintain a trash receptacle outside their business. A lot of the litter in the streets is food wrappers, beverage containers and scratch tickets.
But nothing is foolproof...
Standing next to a trash can, a woman threw a scratched lottery ticket on the ground.
See North End
for 14hrs
Doesn't always work
We used to have businesses volunteer to do this, but it never worked out. Major problems were
- Since there are too few barrels in the city, their barrels got full very fast - daily, if not more often. Since the biz pays for trash removal, it became a huge cost
- Residents who miss trash day just take their household trash to the nearest public bin and dump it there, and the biz's were victims of this - leading back to problem #1 above.
What about the poor saps who
What about the poor saps who have to leave for work before 6 am?
Or people who work nights,
Or people who work nights, and are asleep between 6 and 9 am?
No more trash bags on the
No more trash bags on the street. The city should issue (or at least require businesses and residents) to put out their trash in trash barrels, which prevents leaking garbage, reduces pests eating through bags, and tore bags blowing trash over the streets. This is not unusual in cities across MA or across the country (Newton has city issued barrels, Somerville requires trash be in barrels). Menino was averse to change but hopefully Walsh will see the benefits.
Where would you propose
that someone who lives in a 300 sq ft apartment on a fifth floor walk-up keep his trash barrel?
Wherever the building owner/association can locate it
If he's a renter, that's his landlord's problem. If he's a condo owner, that's his association's problem. What's your hypothetical man doing now? Just filling his 300 sq ft with trash bags all week? If he's generating about a bag a week, then the association/landlord could have 1-2 large common containers that he has to put it in instead of simply on the street. They would be stored wherever the landlord/association is storing any other common items (basement next to the furnace, garage, whatever).
Just because everyone would have to use a trash barrel doesn't mean every single person has to own a trash barrel.
That's physically unrealistic
In a typical house, say, 16 feet wide by 40 feet deep, with the basement containing one apartment and a boiler room, and every other floor containing two apartments, there is literally, no exaggeration, no common area big enough to contain a single trash barrel, much less enough trash barrels to hold the entire building's trash.
There is trash pickup three times per week; so he stores two days worth of trash in the bin under his kitchen sink, and then carries the bag downstairs and puts it out the street, along with the bags from the other 6 apartments in the building.
Barrels are impactical for a number of reasons.
Additionally if you don't have someone to pick up the barrel - if all your condo owners need to work to pay to live in Boston - it quickly becomes the trash container for everyone walking down the street. By the end of the day you have a partially filled barrel to compete with the trash you generate on your own.
Keep on passing ordinances
These folks just don't get it. There are 250 ordinances on the books already--how about finding and making a system to ID and then collect the $$$?
How about neighborhood compactors?
Like the solar ones - only a bit larger? If you wanted to be sure it was neighborhood residents and businesses using them, you could use use an RFID key fob or similar.
Councilor LaMattina...
... How about, instead of making up a new rule, with an arbitrary time (6:00 AM), just go with the existing state sanitary code, which prohibits putting trash out before midnight.
6:00 AM is inconvenient both for night owls who aren't up yet by trash pick-up time, and for early birds who have already left the house by that hour. Midnight, on the other hand, allows most people to put the trash out in the morning, but gives the early birds and night owls a chance to put their trash out legally too.
There is more lead flying in
Boston than at an NRA convention and these boobs are talking trash. Geezus.
Damn straight.
Holding hearings to find out what improvements to trash pickup constituents want and then implementing those improvements, would have an immediate and positive effect on my quality of life. I don't see a similar value in holding hearings about gang violence. I approve of how my city council is spending its time.
Both?
Isn't it possible the city council could deal with both life threatening and qualify-of-life issues at the same time? It's a big city...
Or even better...
How about enforcing current regulations, rather than making new ones? I have yet to see anyone get a $25 ticket in East Boston for not keeping the area in front of their home clean. Or anyone being ticketed for putting out dinky store bags filled with garbage which aren't even tied, even though the City's own trash ordinance states what types of bags are acceptable.
Oh wait, East Boston isn't the North End, so (former) Mayor Menino, Sal LaMattina and other city public servants don't care, unless it interferes with their restaurant patronage. One restaurant owner complained to Menino, who was dining in his restaurant, that he wished that the City would help clean up Eastie streets end enforce trash rules. The mayor opened his wallet and gave him money for a broom.
That's one of the things that
That's one of the things that always puzzles me when walking through Eastie -- without garbage cans, where does this trash live all week? Because a lot of it is obviously food waste, judging from the clouds of flies that swarm up when you walk past them in warmer months.
The other thing I wonder is where the hell all of these discarded mattresses come from? Rental turnover that high?
East Boston has a lot of
East Boston has a lot of illegal rooming houses. When someone doesn't pay their fee their mattress gets tossed.
This explains so much about
This explains so much about the grey market mattress game.
Wow. 1x/week
I am astounded that East Boston only gets trash pickup 1x per week. Is the population density really that much less than the downtown neighborhoods?
Even midnight is too late
Not everyone can stay up until midnight just to put out they trash. Nor is everyone in a position to take out the trash when they have their hands full with getting their family and themselves out the door for work and school.
The folks sorting through the recycling in my neighborhood generally do not leave trash on the ground. On the other hand the folks collecting the trash too often leave some of the trash on the street instead of cleaning it up. Much of the trash in my neighborhood probably comes from the kids going to school who throw wrappers, bags and styrofoam cups on the street. Then there are the adults who treat the street as though it were a trash can.
How much litter actually comes from trash cans put out too early versus all of the other sources of litter? Or is this just a "Look at me I'm your City Councilor."
Reason for moving pick up times to 9
Of course part of the reason for the earlier 7AM pickup time is to cut down on backups caused by the garbage trucks.
Kind of a catch 22.
Fine Globe Direct
and the phone book dumpers.
more should be included
This cat walks the streets of Jamaica Plain all the time and applauds City Councilor Matt O'Malley for focussing attention on keeping Jamaica Plain streets clean. I hope he considers raising the fine for spitting on the sidewalks as well, and dog poop left on sidewalks leading into the business district.