Alley trash pickup a political hot potato

Two years ago Spokane city leaders made voters a deal.

If citizens approved a two-year property tax increase, officials would use the reprieve to get the budget in shape and seek outside advice to bring city spending under control.

But that cost-cutting study – conducted with City Council support and completed by a California consulting firm – is becoming a political liability in this year’s mayoral election.

Perhaps nothing illustrates that more than the escalating uproar over the city’s suspension of alley garbage pickup to 2,200 households on the city’s North Side.

Mayor Dennis Hession, for example, spent most of a campaign breakfast event Tuesday morning in Corbin Park defending his decision to some 50 protesters, many of whom wheeled their garbage bins to the meeting.

The consultants, whose recommendations are contained in a document widely referred to within City Hall as the “Matrix report,” recommended consolidating garbage routes so fewer workers would be needed but left it up to the city to decide specifically how to accomplish it. Hession’s management team decided that part of that goal could be achieved by reducing alley service.

Many at the protest Tuesday said the changes have forced them to haul their trash down an alley and around the block to the front of their homes because their property was specifically designed for alley service. They also voiced concerns that it will negatively impact the elderly and dissuade folks from recycling.

Hession told the crowd that most residents didn’t have alley service even before the change.

“Most people in the city do exactly what you do not want to do,” the mayor said. “These additional costs are borne by everyone else in the city.”

Not everyone agrees with Hession’s reasoning.

His critics say he has blindly followed the Matrix report without considering local conditions or desires.

“Being efficient is different than lowering the level of service,” mayoral candidate and City Councilman Al French said. “If you’re going to lower the level of service, that’s a conversation the whole community should have. That’s not a conversation for one person.”

Still, French, mayoral candidate Mary Verner and the rest of City Council voted last year to support Hession’s plan to hire Matrix for $260,000. French says his problem isn’t so much with the study, but with how the mayor has implemented it.

Hession argues that he’s standing firm on some portions of the study for the financial health and overall good of the city, and suggested some City Council members are backpedaling now that unpopular, budget-balancing decisions are having to be made.

“The council voted unanimously to approve going forward with the efficiency study. Now they appear interested in running away from it,” Hession said. “We made a promise to the citizens … that we would engage in a third-party analysis on our efficiency and effectiveness. That was a commitment that we made. That’s a matter of integrity to me.”

In addition to residents upset over the loss of alley service, opposition with more political overtones has surfaced as well.

Labor unions representing city workers who fear loss of jobs and weakening of benefits are wading into the fight. The city’s largest labor union, for example, has endorsed French and Verner over Hession and two other candidates vying for the mayor’s office. The union representing city firefighters has given $5,000 to French’s campaign, the single-largest contribution it’s ever made to a Spokane mayoral candidate.

Verner acknowledges supporting the decision to hire the Matrix Consulting Group.

But after having seen the Matrix results, she said she regrets it. She said she expected more depth on reducing medical expenses, for instance, and adds that few of the ideas were new or visionary.

“What we received was not what we expected at all,” Verner said.

French, Verner and mayoral candidate Michael Noder say they would restore cuts to alley service soon after taking office.

But Verner would not rule out future alley cuts after a public process that determines if there’s a different alley service plan that would “make more sense.”

French said he would not reconsider alley service reductions and would find other ways to cut costs, perhaps by buying smaller trucks that can maneuver through alleys faster.

“The quality of the neighborhoods is a higher priority to me than accommodating garbage trucks,” French said.

An attempt to reach the fifth candidate, Robert Kroboth, was unsuccessful.

Noder, a member of the Solid Waste Advisory Committee who observed Tuesday’s protest, said the alley change will hardly make a dent in the trash budget.

“It is disingenuous to cite economic performance as cause for forcing this current, unwanted change,” Noder said in correspondence sent to Hession this week. “Any savings are likely to be quite small relative to billing impacts and I doubt would be passed on to the ratepayers.”

The idea of getting a third-party opinion came from a committee created by then-Mayor Jim West that analyzed whether the city should ask for more taxes.

It’s not the first outside opinion. The city spent $150,000 a few years ago on a consultant to determine its “priorities in government.” Another consultant was hired by the city in 1998.

When Hession approached the council last year to approve the contract for Matrix, he vowed that results wouldn’t be ignored.

“The hard recommendations that will come out of that will (not be) an easy thing to sell to the public or to our employees, but we are going to do that,” he said at the time, according to a Spokesman-Review article.

Tough sells aren’t necessarily good policy, Verner said.

“To me, labeling some of the recommendations as hard is not the same as looking at the recommendations and seeing whether or not they are a good fit for Spokane,” Verner said.

Trash is by no means the only controversial topic from Matrix.

Perhaps even tougher is Matrix’s recommendation to reduce the number of police officers and firefighters at the same time City Council has struggled to find ways to hire more.

The mayor has said he is willing to go against those recommendations based on advice he gets from his police and fire chiefs. He said last week that he will soon announce a public safety plan that will include his desired police and fire staffing levels.

The Matrix report started becoming controversial in January when the mayor refused to release a draft version of it, arguing that errors needed to be corrected first.

City Councilman Rob Crow said early handling of the report likely didn’t help the public’s perception of it. Still, Crow said he believes the mayor’s consideration of Matrix has been more careful than commonly portrayed by opponents.

Love it or hate it, the Matrix report has performed an important service to city government, Crow said.

“It did its job of stimulating the conversation in ways that a suggestion by the mayor or the council could not have done,” Crow said. “It caused a whole lot of conversation to occur.”