loaderimg
image

City trash collection is a problem—but there are reasons for optimism

This article first appeared in the Solutions newsletter. Click here to learn more about the newsletter and sign up.


No one wants to live in a city where hot trash just piles up.

That’s the kind of problem that affects more day-to-day lives—and the region’s reputation—than some of the dialogue we all heard four years ago in the last mayor’s race, which featured accusations of “pay-to-play” politics and “dog-whistle” racism. Yet since then, Mayor Tishaura Jones has said she wants a “public discourse that is characterized by debates of public policy and not debate of personality,” and Alderwoman Cara Spencer, who is again vying with Jones for control of Room 200, has premised her campaign on the notion that “the city is failing to do its most basic jobs.” So maybe this cycle, we’ll hear more debate in that vein.

And how are city services looking? An SLM tally of complaints made by residents to the Citizens’ Services Bureau over the past seven mayoral years (which go from May 1–April 30, given that mayors take office in the second half of April) suggests that certain problems have stayed consistent since at least the Lyda Krewson administration. Potholes and streetlight outages are two. 

If, in your view, the city wasn’t failing in these respects during the Krewson administration, then you can’t say it’s failing now. Or maybe you believe that the failure has been consistent, and the question for the upcoming election is who’s better positioned to turn things around. What you cannot easily say, looking at these numbers, is that potholes and streetlight problems have gotten far worse under the Jones administration.

Complaints about trash collection, however, have indeed gotten worse, though they’re coming back down from the high point in Jones’ second year. (The totals for trash collection includes seven categories. At press time, a spokesperson for the mayor said they could not confirm SLM’s analysis by deadline, adding: “We do collect data on all of those terms so that we can constantly evaluate performance.”If they come back with more input, I’ll update the website version of this story.)

The consequences of dysfunctional trash collection are too obvious (and odoriferous) to mention, but for highlights, check out some of the entries in the “St. Louis Dumpster Watch” series by the now-defunct Riverfront Times.

The culprit here, by all accounts, is a shortage of trash truck drivers, and the ones that the city does have on the payroll have shown some frustration lately: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that in late May, about a third of drivers called in sick to protest “low pay, heavy workloads and poor treatment from management.”

But the city has taken a number of steps to address these concerns: 

  • It has reserved $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for a study on the efficiency of refuse collection.
  • It has increased pay for all city employees and established a $3,000 signing bonus; on top of the $44,000 base salary for refuse drivers, it has set up new retention increases after five, 10, and 15 years of service.
  • On Thursday, in response to an aldermanic push to channel more money toward this issue, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment (i.e., the mayor, the comptroller, and the president of the Board of Aldermen) shifted things in next year’s budget to create more trash-truck-driver positions.
  • The Personnel Department has begun using Taleo, a completely digital hiring platform.

That last point bears emphasis: Until this year, the city was using a paper-based hiring system. Filling a spot was taking three to six months, according to an email from a mayoral spokesperson. That’s a long time for a qualified candidate to wait for the city’s response. Personnel is hoping that Taleo will bring the process down to “within industry standards of a few weeks.” (The city is also transitioning to another software, HireRight, to streamline background and drug testing.)

It’s too early to know whether Taleo is making a dent in this problem; the city only launched it in May. It’s used by the city of Chicago, Stanford University, and the University of Colorado, among other entities. At least one city—San Jose, California—just went the other way and switched from Taleo to different software “to address a decentralized hiring model allowing for a more automated, streamlined hiring process,” a spokesperson for that city told me; St. Louis may or may not follow a similar trajectory. (Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment; if they do, I’ll update the website version of this story.) In any event, it’s hard to imagine how a digital system would end up being slower than a paper system.

Keep in mind, too, that the complaints about trash collection already came down significantly in Jones’ third year, before the city adopted this new software. So combine that and the budgetary shift approved last week, and you have at least some reason for optimism.

Jones once told me in an interview, “[Voters] won’t trust us to do the big things if we can’t do the small things.” Making these trash-complaint numbers smaller could well be a big boost for her prospects in April.

Share the Post:

Related Posts