City Manager Jay Cravens in his September 30th letter to residents said the, "There is an information page on the City's website listing various services offered by each waste hauler and their costs which you may wish to review in making your decision. Visit our website at www.citybloomfieldhillsmi.net ".

We visited it yesterday as part of our morning constitutional on the world wide web. On the front page directly below the picture which changes frequently we found two boxes. The one on the left says Building Department and clicking on it takes you to the building department. The box on the right says Single Waste Hauler.

Clicking on that produces not one but two linked pages that are both titled Single Waste Hauler Information. Doing so produces eight documents or letters. If you are counting Six support the City's point of view. Two are neutral information pieces. All would be of value if City residents were, from the beginning, part of the discussion. There is a pro and con side to every argument and to make a wise decision it helps to know both.

One of the documents is appears twice. It is a Hubbel Roth etter dated September 18th 2008.City Manager Cravens quoted from it in his letter to the residents It says that garbage truck destroy roads, So do many things and garbage trucks are not the only heavy trucksdestroying our roads.

City Manager Craven's proposal to City Commission, however calls for more Garbage and recycle trucks by a factor of 2x and the addition of cube vans to maintain services residents now enjoy.
Two other documents are pdf files on the complete single waste haulmg systems of Bloomfield Township and Rochester Hills. Mr. Cravens borrowed heavily from these communities in preparing his proposal for the City. In the township (Population 41,000) a single waste hauler picks up trash five days a week and in Rochester Hills (Population 71,000) it is a four days a week pick up.. With four waste haulers our City picks up on Monday. Tuesday and Thursday with considerably less and smaller vehicles. (Source: City Matrix of Service).

On the City website there is also an opinion editorial to the Ann Arbor News from August of 2005 which argues the advantages of a regional waste hauler.
The reason why all the pieces on the City web site a= are old is because they were considered for the 2010 Public hearing on a single waste hauler for the City. In that year the choice which City Commission rejected was either a true single hauler replacing many. This year's proposed however is of a yet unnamed waste hauler comes with the baggage of 28 pages of rules, regulations, and even subcontractor hires City residents must abide by.

The regional waste hauler discussed in the Ann Arbor article is an interesting concept that has not been widely discussed in our part of Oakland County.

The last is a letter from Diane Holden who is Director of Transportation for Bloomfield Hills Schools. She is a very interesting woman with very interesting job. She was in management, drove a school bus to help out, before quickly being promoted to running transportation for the district. We called and asked if anyone in our City Hall had replied to her letter either in writing or by phone. She said she couldn't remember because about that time, back then October 15 2009. she had just started at Director BHS Transportation Director.

We learned a lot about how the BHS transportation serves a extensive variety of communities and schools. This publication wondered if school busses which arrive and depart at definite times couldn't be separated from commercial vehicles which by current ordinance arrive no earlier than 7 am and could be with proper planning and perhaps a new ordinance be pushed back to
say 9:15 am when all school busses had left the scene. This would be most critical in the months of when day daylight savings is not observed.

We will tell you more about that and the rather remarkable BHS transportation system in a future post.

The remaining items the City posts on its website include a Matrix of services and a Comparison of waste hauler rates a and services in other communities are of use to the November 4 Voter. They are accurate and relatively impartial . We will cover them both separately in future posts. By clicking on the title below the featured post will appear as it does on the City website.