Trash Talk about Trash Pickup

Last night there were some hard feelings at the council bench over a majority decision to put the city’s trash hauling contract out for bid while Waste Management’s current contract is still in effect. In his statements explaining why he would vote against the measure, Councilman Joe Romano stated “something stinks here, and it’s not the garbage!”  He then went on to imply that campaign contributions from a competitive trash hauler might explain what he viewed as the majority’s haste in sending the contract out to bid.

Positions of Proponents and Opponents

The council members holding the minority position, Maria Schmidt, Barbara Ziarko, and Joseph Romano, argued that sending the contract out for bids was premature, that they didn’t have adequate time to review the bid specification due to the election, and that the city could simply exercise its option to extend the current contract for a one- or two-year term. They didn’t see a need to send the contract out for bids at this time, and at least one of them expressed concern over the potential for a lawsuit by Waste Management, which currently has an exclusive license for curbside recyclables collection.

On the other hand, Council Members Skrzyniarz, Koski, Shannon and Mayor Taylor argued that sending the contract out for bids would likely result in a substantial savings to the city, and it could introduce the possibility of new services, i.e. mechanized trash collection via 64- or 96-gallon wheeled containers, plus curbside single-stream recycling at no extra charge to the residents.  Citing the potential for a half million dollar savings to the city on the single largest outsourced service the city contracts, the majority view was that the worst that would happen would be the extension of the current contract with Waste Management under the terms already in place.

Mr. Romano’s Charge

Mr. Romano was the last opposing council member to speak on the issue, and in his talk he described the matter in a way that suggested back room politicking and tit-for-tat accommodations for campaign contributors.  He cited Rizzo Services’ contributions to all of the incumbents as somehow being an improper attempt to influence council to send the contract out to bid while their competitor and long time contract holder Waste Management still has time left to go on its current contract, two possible extensions, and an exclusive license for curbside recycling in the city until 2018.

Mayor Taylor’s Rebuttal

Mayor Taylor stated that he “resented” Mr. Romano’s charge, and that nobody from Rizzo had ever suggested their contribution was made in anything more than the spirit of seeking good government for the city.  He then went on at some length to explain his reasons for bringing the matter to the fore, including the facts that the bid specification had been in the works for months, and that a substantially unchanged version was made available to the council over one month before last night’s vote.

Was this really necessary?

Mr. Romano’s statements regarding campaign contributions were out of line.  His speculation that the Mayor and council members who sided with the majority vote were somehow acting improperly and hastily were just that: idle speculation.  In the process of making his accusation, not only did he accuse fellow members of council of wrongdoing, he also accused a local Sterling Heights business of bribery.  Mr. Romano, in your statement you said you wanted to avoid lawsuits.  Can you explain how making a slanderous accusation such as this aligns with trying to keep the city out of court?

When someone make accusations that attack peoples’ integrity, there should be proof.  Conjecture and speculation amounts to little more than gossip.  Mr. Romano may well be upset to find himself on the losing side of the vote on this issue, but that doesn’t justify the statements he made that impugn the integrity of the majority side and Rizzo Services.

Positive Signs

Yet, even with all of the discord, something very positive happened during the discussion.  After Mayor Taylor gave his opinion on the issue at some length, Councilwoman Ziarko made a rebuttal to some of his statements.  Suddenly, we had an actual debate!  It was short-lived, but it represented a baby step towards something I’ve wanted to see at the council bench for some time: actual deliberations, a back-and-forth discussion of the issues, and real consideration of both sides. I give Mayor Taylor credit for allowing and perhaps even encouraging this sort of exchange, and to Councilwoman Ziarko for speaking her mind even after her turn was over.  We need more of this.  With the Open Meetings Act preventing deliberations outside of a public meeting, it has to happen somewhere.

In the end, City Council will get past this.  Mr. Romano would do well to remember that making accusations of this nature against people you’ve just been re-elected to serve with for two more years is counter-productive.  As for the opposition by Councilwomen Schmidt and Ziarko, I think their points were well made, but sometimes that isn’t enough to win the day.

Finally, nobody really can claim that this council is a “rubber stamp” on much of anything after witnessing this exchange.  These people really are all trying to do what’s best for the city, and they don’t always agree.  It’s somewhat rare that you’ll see it to this extent, but it does happen.

The Lessons of the 2015 Election

Last night, the election returns confirmed what many had suspected would happen all along: Michael C. Taylor and the incumbent city council handily beat Paul Smith and his slate of challenger candidates.  The victory is meaningful, and several lessons can be drawn from what took place.

Among other things, Smith’s success in organizing the petition drive against the Anti-LGBT discrimination ordinance compelled him and several of the challenger candidates to run for office.  Convinced that receiving over 8,000 petition signatures represented true victory, they thought they had found support which would sweep them into office.  Fortunately for the city, there is a much different threshold one must cross to get somebody to vote for you than there is to get somebody to sign a petition.  If you are not honest in the way you go about convincing people to sign a petition, it is easy to mistake a successful petition drive for a barometer on the will of the people.  The resulting, deeply flawed indication from the petitions sparked a political campaign that proved to only have a fraction of the support the petition garnered.  Petitions are petitions, and elections are elections.  Mistake one for the other and you may wind up as disappointed as Mr. Smith and the challengers.

Smart Meter activism informed the campaigns of two of the candidates.  At some point, those candidates should have realized that the difficulty they were having gaining traction on the Smart Meter issue in council chambers meant they would face an even more uphill battle trying to win an election on the issue.  Smart Meter activism is crackpot activism, and it led to a crackpot campaign.  It is little surprise that it wasn’t possible to win election based on pseudo-scientific hearsay and conjecture, even to those candidates, so rather than reconsider their bids, they decided to double-down on bad ideas and attack immigration in a city with a large immigrant population.  The immigrant voters stayed away in droves.  Bigotry does not win in 2015’s Sterling Heights, nor do crackpots.  The city is more sophisticated than that.

The debate over a proposed mosque in the city, even though it gathered a great deal of attention in the media and exposed the xenophobic biases of several of the candidates, ultimately failed to impact the vote the way the challengers hoped.  Perhaps more accurately, the Smith camp failed in its attempt to hang the mosque proposal around the necks of the incumbents.  The voters could not be convinced that a sitting council which remained neutral on the issue was doing anything other than following the law and remaining within the bounds of its purview on land use decisions.  The charges that council was either pro-mosque or anti-mosque were without merit, and the voters ultimately ignored them.

Incumbency is powerful.  Nate Shannon, a perfectly reasonable man who has proven to be a perfectly satisfactory city council member, could not get elected in his original bid for office.  Yet, after being appointed and serving in the position for nine months, he won the election handily.  The difference?  The depth and strength of his support, combined with the fact that a city’s voters can be convinced more easily to maintain the status quo than they can be convinced to take the risk of electing someone new.  Mr. Shannon, although technically the weakest candidate on the incumbent slate due to the nature of how he got into office, has demonstrated that the campaign dollars flow to the candidates who people can trust to keep the city on an even keel.  This made all of the difference in the world.

The difference in the percentage of the votes between the new Mayor Pro-Tem, Joseph V. Romano, and the candidate who was re-elected with the least number of votes, Maria Schmidt, is 1.26%.  If you look at the vote counts, the council candidates were all within a few hundred votes of each other in an election that counted over 88,000 votes.  My conclusion?  The difference between the Mayor Pro-Tem’s support and any of the other re-elected council members is statistically insignificant.  There is no council member significantly stronger or weaker than the rest of the pack.   On the other hand, the difference between the candidates who were re-elected and the challenger candidates was vast: at minimum, over 5,000 votes.  My contention from the very beginning of this campaign was that the challengers would be extremely lucky to elect one candidate, and that Mr. Smith had no chance of being elected at all, and although I’m a little surprised about the order the challengers finished in, my basic premise proved to be right.

In the end, a very poor-quality group of challenger candidates took on a well-established group of incumbents, and predictably, the challengers lost.  Much will be made by the losing side in the coming weeks about how voter apathy is to blame for the election results, but I maintain that the voters who came to the polls were the ones who made the right choice; in other words, only the best qualified voters were the ones who showed up.  This morning, Mr. Smith posted to one of his Facebook pages that his campaign signs will be collected beginning today in preparation for another election bid in 2017.  He should save his time and money and just throw them away instead: a repeat of this election in 2017 will have no different results.  His political career in Sterling Heights is finished.

Finally, a personal note to my readers: this blog has been running for about five years now, and it had its best week ever over the last seven days in terms of page views.  Thank you for your readership, it is very gratifying to see people coming to the site to see what I have to say.  I appreciate your support, feedback, and referrals of the site to your friends and neighbors.  I feel very fortunate to have an audience, and I will continue to work to make your time spent reading here worthwhile.