The citizen presentation made at Monday’s Spokane City Council meeting was too civilized, too organized and too thoughtful to be considered trash talk. But it was all about trash.

More specifically, it was about the city’s abrupt notification to several north Spokane neighborhoods that the city would cease collecting their garbage from the alleys where that service had been performed for decades. Henceforth, residents would have to place their solid waste and yard waste containers at the curb in front of their homes.

The residents had only a week or two of warning about the change that city officials had ordained, apparently as a cost-saving step, without ever opening the issue to public discussion. That was a mistake. It would have been smarter to engage citizens in a problem-solving partnership and hear their viewpoints up front instead of notifying them, after the fact, of a policy decision that will affect many of them severely.

Had officials done that, they would have learned that historic neighborhoods such as the Logan and Corbin Park areas reflect living styles that prevailed years ago. Many of those houses have no driveways. Some garages open onto the alley, which is where utility access, including refuse pickup, has always been conducted.

Come winter, many residents will have only unpleasant options in complying with the city’s expectation – drag full garbage containers over piles of ice and snow that might include berms left along the curb by city snowplows, or trudge down the alley and around the block to the curb, then back again in the afternoon.

The City Council voted 6-0 to encourage the mayor to “suspend the termination of alley garbage and clean green programs.” Having completed this round of alley terminations, city administrators now say they’ve heard the council and won’t order any more. But they aren’t contemplating undoing what’s been done.

With the mayor up for election and two council members seeking his job, one can’t ignore the political motivations that loom over this issue. But that approach would only add to the unfairness already felt by citizens who never got the chance to advocate for less onerous solutions, from placing all garbage containers on the same side of the alley to buying smaller automated trucks that will maneuver better in alleys. For the record, the Matrix study that encouraged Spokane to achieve more automated garbage pickup specifically noted the latter strategy was successful in Long Beach, Calif.

Leaders in the mayor’s office and on the council have an obligation to run the city as efficiently and economically as possible, but part of that obligation requires them to tap the knowledge that only the public possesses. Now they owe it to citizens to look for ways to rectify the serious inconveniences that have been imposed – and to make sure that similar decisions are managed more collaboratively in the future.