Billboards make a city look incredibly trashy. They are the worst kind of visual pollution. Not exactly a way to work towards creating a "world class city." We could also encourage and legalize prostitution, gaming houses, adult movie parlors, liquor stores, and gun shops on every block (including Land park and East Sacramento), as well as child labor within City limits. That would certainly increase revenues for some businesses, but they are not necessarily good ideas. What else can we sell to get our City out of debt? How about selling our children?

Dale, I have read the numerous articles on this issue and almost all the comments published in the last month or more in the SacPress, including yours that have peppered these pages for the last few months. You make a small number of good points, but as MANY others have pointed out, your article on this issue was disorganized, not compelling, and long on emotion and short on reasonable facts, and almost all of your follow up comments follow suit. Like you've just done here today, you routinely dismiss good points other people make with insults and arrogance, which is not acceptable for productive discourse. "Your idealism and naivety [sic/sp] doesn't [sic] fit with our reality," you tell me. Nice guy! I could throw equally nasty comments back at you, but I don't see the point. While I admitted I don't know everything about the problems with central city waste collection (which I'm sure are wide and varied), you are also not all-knowing or free from error or ignorance, even though you clearly think your viewpoints are far more valuable than anyone else's, that your experience is the only valid one, and that your opinions should hold sway no matter what. Also, I don't think my points about clogged sewer drains, street flooding, mosquito problems, and hazards for bikes and cars posed by street waste piles were AT ALL debunked in recent weeks by anyone writing coherently or in the business of city services. Indeed, I see that many of my points were supported or already made quite cogently by numerous other community members writing comments to these articles, including some of your neighbors, and also including your seeming arch-nemesis, Gabriel. But since you insulted his reasonable responses at length, too, and insulted or illogically rejected these same points when others made them, I'm not surprised to be getting the same treatment. I don't know any of you, but it's obvious to me who is making the most sense and who deserves to be listened to, and it's not people who are rude and insulting. Good luck making your neighborhood a nice place to live. You need it.

I have NEVER seen or heard of people bringing yard clippings from the suburbs to Midtown to dump in the street -- either individuals or landscape companies. If the point is that it takes extra effort to bin your yard waste, who would pack it all in a truck and sneak it into Midtown to dump it? Ridiculous! Most residents who do their own yard work want the process to be as easy and fast as possible, and this "plot" against the inner city doesn't fit. And all the landscapers who serviced yards in our neighborhood put the waste in bins or in the resident's authorized waste pile. Hauling yard waste 20-45 minutes downtown sounds like a whole lot of extra effort that most people wouldn't be willing to do (and it costs extra gas), including most landscapers who wouldn't be that obvious or dumb, esp. when they can leave the waste at the residence or pass along the cost of bringing the waste to a proper facility directly to their clients. If you ever see that happen, then call the city for a code violation (illegal dumping) with the license number of the vehicle. Otherwise, claiming that this is a common, widespread practice of suburbanites sounds totally paranoid and unlikely, stemming from an "us against them" mentality that isn't going to solve any waste problem in your neighborhood whatsoever. On individual streets both in and outside the central city, sometimes neighbors will put some extra yard waste on a neighbor's pile in places where both bins and in-street waste pick-up are happening. But perhaps that's where neighbors need to get to know each other and split the fee for having one or two regular locations for in-street yard waste pick up that numerous people share? Or, if one neighbor is regularly abusing someone else's in-street pile, people can report others for a citation who aren't using their bins or paying for in-street pick up. It just seems there are better solutions than totally rejecting the new bin system altogether or insisting that half the city should opt out. Finally, I note that neither response (Dale, Rhys) dealt with the very real points that bins help prevent street flooding, mosquito breeding, and traffic problems when people have to try to avoid big piles of yard waste with their cars and bicycles. Instead, the replies seem to rejoice in pitting central city residents against suburbanites using arguments that ring false. Interesting.

[I'm dividing this reply into two entries since it's too long for one] For anyone who has a yard, composting is really a big part of the answer if people have "too much for their own container." Mulching leaves with a mower is easy, fast, and it almost totally eliminates the need to rake, even in the fall. It's certainly much easier to do than raking up huge piles of leaves and hauling them to a compost pile, a street pile, or a bin, and it's much better for the soil. It would be great if the city did an education campaign about composting and mower mulching, as these are truly the best options. -- It appears the City more frequently pick-ups on-street green waste during the fall when more leaves need to be dealt with, so perhaps they can do more frequent pick-ups of the bins, too during certain seasons or upon request. There doesn't need to be an unmanageable excess in any neighborhood. However, it seems that creative solutions might best be targeted to specific neighborhoods rather than have a city-wide policy regarding bins or no bins for yard waste, since some of the issues faced by those in the central-city areas are indeed different from issues of folks in the suburbs. But please don't imply that I or anyone else participating in this discussion needs to move to Midtown or the central city to understand -- I and many other suburbanites are open to hearing about the plights of maintaining property in the central city, but just as much as central city residents don't want a city-wide policy applied to you if it doesn't make sense, why should people who chose to live in suburban areas have policies that really work best for people in Midtown areas? I actually chose to live outside of Midtown because it was cheaper to move farther out, but certainly having garbage all over my lawn or people regularly pawing through my garbage and recycling and mixing it all up would have turned me off to central-city living (plus, if you know someone is going to paw through for recyclables, then aren't their creative solutions for this that you could try? Put them in a bag or box inside your bin at the top where folks can grab them easily, or come up with another plan to distribute them so your bins aren't totally messed up). The argument about the dilemma of "your 75-80 year old mother" doesn't make a lot of sense. First, wouldn't she need to have all that stuff in her yard picked up anyway, most of which needs to go in some kind of bin? Cans and bottles in recycling, and trash in the garbage bin? So what's the big deal about adding a third bin for yard waste? (except perhaps for limited space to store all the bins) And perhaps more important, doesn't this issue of the elderly needing help picking up yard waste and debris in their yards speak to more pressing social issues -- for extended family and neighbors to help out those who need it, such as the elderly? If I lived in the same city as my elderly mother or grandmother and bought her a house where she'd have to deal with lots of yard waste OR other people's trash scattered on her lawn, I'd help her out by doing this sort of work as much as possible myself rather than complaining that the city's system for dealing with trash was defective.

I think that the bins are really smart and effective, and it would be great if people tried them for a while before rejecting them or complaining about them. There are several serious problems with leaving leaf and yard clipping debris in piles in the street: 1) During fall, winter, and spring, this debris can and does get blown and swept by rain into the drain and sewer systems, which often causes widespread street flooding. When this backup is severe during strong storms, entire neighborhoods can flood into first floor levels, which happened a couple years ago in parts of Land Park. 2) The Mosquito and Vector Control District tells us that some of the most common places where mosquitoes breed in our urban and suburban neighborhoods in Sac are in standing pools of water in storm drains that are only exist because there is leaf and plant material preventing the water from properly draining away. 3) Numerous piles of debris in the street make it harder to safely drive down streets, harder to find a place to park on the street, more dangerous backing out of driveways, and far more dangerous for cyclists who must swerve into traffic to avoid the piles. 4) The use of the "claw" to pick up debris piled in the street often causes deep scrapes in the street asphalt which means that more frequent street re-paving projects are required, which costs taxpayers more money if we want smooth streets. A few years ago when we lived in the Pocket and the City switched us to "containerized green waste collection," or green waste bins, we were thrilled with how much easier it made collecting clippings and yard debris from our backyard (better than a wheelbarrow), and how tidy it kept the debris until the day when it would be picked up. We've since moved to Fair Oaks where in our neighborhood the bin is the only obvious option (I've never seen a pile of debris in the street left for pickup anywhere in our neighborhood), and everyone uses the bins regularly and without any obvious trouble. The bins keep the streets and sewer drains much cleaner, and it's nice to know that when I do yard work, I only have to move the clippings and debris one time -- into the bin, rather than messing with my leaf and debris pile on different days to keep it from blowing all over the place before pick up day. I think people are often resistant to change, but if they try the bins with open minds, they might realize that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for typical yard work. I also like that they save our municipalities money in several ways. So, I strongly support the City's policy of charging people more who insist on putting their yard debris in the street, since it not only costs more to pick the stuff up in that form, but it also costs more in sewer and street maintenance as I mentioned above. Of course the cheapest option is to compost most of your yard debris yourself and use it for fertilizer, which cuts down on the amount the City needs to collect, but that's not always possible or desirable. So for everything you can't or don't want to compost, the bins are great. Frankly, I'd support eliminating the on-the-street pick up as an "option" except for special requests, which people would have to pay for out of pocket. These special request trips would likely cost far more than $12.41 per trip, let alone only that much per utility billing cycle, but people need to pay for impractical options if they insist upon them. We don't dump our garbage in big, open heaps in the street to be picked up by the 'claw" machine, and there's little better reason to continue doing that with green waste now that we've found a better option with containerized bins (and backyard composting).