Joe Soucheray: Test the sirens! The season of Trash Emergencies is upon us!
The first three days of the Trash Emergency were cloaked in gloom. We weren't under a watch. We were in a warning. Not exactly despair, but resignation set in, as though sheltering in the basement and sprinkling the children with holy water were to be the accommodating ministrations.
The collection of our bins was in jeopardy.
That is, the collection of our bins was in jeopardy until the mayor declared a Trash Emergency, a power we didn't know the mayor even had nor had the power ever been previously used.
It wasn't an entirely chaotic start. After the new hauler, FCC Environmental Services, came through, some bins were tipped over in the street, some were on their backs in the yard and couldn't get up. But certainly, a disaster was averted and we were spared photographs in the newspapers of uncollected piles of garbage, like we sometimes see from Rome or New York.
Unfortunately, the Trash Emergency is good for only 90 days, unless mayors have a post-trash-emergency emergency they can pull from their vest. A recent communication breakdown appears to be the root of the problem, although a great many of us looking for the problem would go back seven years or so when the city fixed a system that wasn't broken. Out went the family-owned haulers and in came only five haulers, all to ostensibly reduce noise and save the Earth, neither of which happened anyway.
And then, just when we were finally getting to at least a hand-waving familiarity with one of the big five haulers, out they go in favor of FCC Environmental, which won the current bidding process. That was last year, August, even months ago.
FCC bought property at the foot of Randolph Avenue at Shepard Road. It's a big brown field surrounded by a chain-link fence. They bought the land after a developer probably gave up on it because not many developers want to develop in St. Paul with rent control breathing down their necks. It's been a big brown field for as long as anyone can remember. This is where FCC would dispatch trucks, wash them and fuel them with compressed natural gas.
FCC had it clarified from the city zoning administrator that FCC's intention for the land fit with I-1 zoning, light industrial, similar to the uses of a public works yard. They were going to build a headquarters and pay property taxes.
Good to go!
Whoa, hold up a minute. The West Seventh/Fort Road Federation got the ear of the city Planning Commission and appealed, but the commission supported the stance taken by the city staff.
The neighborhood advocates then went to the least diverse city council in America, who probably had to put down a resolution they were studying to preserve sand in the Polynesian Islands, and the next thing you know, the council voted to uphold the neighborhood federation's appeal and right on the cusp of its April 1 start date, FCC had no base of operations.
A war within a war seems to have developed. Mayor Melvin Carter told the council that they had plunged the city into crisis. He called the Trash Emergency. That was for three days, but the council did vote to allow a 90-day Trash Emergency. Council President Rebecca Noecker, presumably smarting, told the mayor and FCC that they had better use the 90 days to find a new site for that $25 million dispatch center.
If you were dropped out of a spaceship having never seen Earth, and shown the land in question, you'd say, 'This looks like a place where a trash-hauling company might operate.'
But not in St. Paul. Not to worry. We're playing with house money. Still more than 80 days to go with the Trash Emergency, all the time in the world.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray's 'Garage Logic' podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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