PHILADELPHIA’S $3,750.00 TRASH CANS

OH MY GOD!!! AHHHHHHHHHH….KA-BOOOM! Once again the sound of my head exploding echos through the neighborhood.

Take a look at your federal stimulus tax dollars at work. Take a good hard look. But first wrap your frigging skull in duct tape because I guarantee it’s going to explode. You heard of $700 toilet seats from the Pentagon? $500 hammers? That’s amateur hour compared to this. Pictured above my friends is a three thousand dollar trash can courtesy of the City of Philadelphia and Uncle Sam. That’s right. It costs a lot of green to go green.

This is the “solar-powered” trash compactor that sit’s on the corner of 6th & South St. outside the firehouse. As you can see it hasn’t been doing much compacting lately. In fact the one across the street looked pretty much the same. I talked with one of the fellas at the station and he related a little story to me that goes like this: when he has the late night watch he gets to see the sanitation workers empty these “compactors”. Apparently according to the sanitation workers these cans are the biggest scam going. They don’t seem to compact anything. They pull out an oversize trash can inserted into the container and empty it like an ordinary can. WDH?

So this caused me to do a little research. Since the Nutter administration has literally gone nuts introducing a $300 a year tax for residential trash pick up in the city, I was duly intrigued. Since these “compactors” are all over center city any more I thought I should check them out. And what I found out is cause for a duct tape alert!

Philadelphia, PA – The Philadelphia Inquirer:
City gets $14.1 million energy grant

October 9, 2009 06:00 AM

The grant, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – the economic stimulus package – is one of hundreds of energy-efficiency “formula grants,” based mostly on population, going to states, counties, cities and tribes. Grants will total $2.7 billion.

The grant program sets specific core areas where the money could be used – building retrofits, conservation programs, and energy audits, for instance. Within that, Gajewski said, city officials picked projects “that were either under way and needed additional funding, or programs that were in the wings that we wanted to use as opportunity to get off the ground.”

The city’s 500 BigBelly solar-powered streetside trash compactors have proven so popular since being introduced last spring that the city plans to spend $973,000 to buy 260 more to place along commercial corridors.

Vandalism has been minimal – graffiti and a car hit is about the extent of it – and the city has saved fuel and employee time, because the bins have to be emptied twice a week instead of five times.

Now 973,000 divided by 260 equals approximately $3,742.00 PER CAN!!! These cans are being bought and paid for with tax dollars at a time when Mayor Nutter wants to implement a 2 cent per ounce drink tax for sugary drinks and a $300 a year residential trash pickup tax. This is ostensibly to close a 125-130 million dollar projected budget deficit! But wait it gets better.

These new taxes come at the same time the city’s real estate tax bureau (Bureau of Revision of Taxes) has been dissolved in a scandal of uncollected millions in revenue and unqualified patronage workers. With national unemployment at 10%+ and Philly unemployment WAAAAY higher than that we have another liberal, tax and SPEND INTO OBLIVION DEMOCRAT administration fleecing residents while pissing away money on “Green Trash cans”! AHHHHHHH!!! KA BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

You have to click this link (BIG BELLY ) to really get an idea how we are being abused by these nuts. This is the same administration that closed seven fire companies last year yet can come up with millions for trash cans??? I dare anyone to defend this insanity!

Just remember what we were told about this stimulus money. Remember shovel ready? Remember jobs saved? How many jobs can you save with a $,500 trash can? This is just insane. I put a fire out in one of these compactors last week. What is the maintenance cost projected to be on these over the years? The city can’t afford to maintain our fire trucks (mine has been waiting on a ten-hour job to fix a serious air leak) for weeks now.

Who is going to be fixing these cans- Union trash compactor mechanics? When the old wire baskets were set on fire by one of the Zombies who roam our streets endlessly they just cleaned out the burned up trash and put new bags in it. No problem. Didn’t cost much and the environment is still pretty much in tact. Now they are wasting our money faster than it can be printed.

Good God almighty are we in trouble.