It’s trash day in the great rotten borough

One of the more annoying features of our great rotten borough is the way certain people and institutions get away with things that the rest of us cannot.

Casinos on the Strip, for example, are allowed to have waterfalls, lagoons, volcanos and even dancing waters, but the rest of us aren’t supposed to wash our cars in the driveway.

In Tuesday’s newspaper, Review-Journal county reporter Kristi Jourdan brought another such tale to light: Union carpenter Lyle Lyddon, who sometimes has to travel out of state for work, still must pay his monthly trash fee, notwithstanding the fact that when he’s gone, there’s no trash to pick up.

Under a county ordinance, if you pay to keep your electricity and water going, you have to pay the trash fee, too. (Officials argue the rule is necessary to prevent people from dumping trash in the desert to beat the system, or perhaps smuggle their trash in with a neighbor who does pay for pickup.)

Lyddon keeps his lights and water on because he uses those services – electricity to power a burglar alarm and water to irrigate his landscaping. But he’s not generating trash.

After seeing an unpaid bill go to collections, Lyddon complained to his county commissioner, Steve Sisolak. The problem, Sisolak says, lies with the long franchise agreement, which doesn’t expire until 2035.

“It is what it is,” says Sisolak. “Whether that’s right or not, that’s not the point. Some commissioners in the past gave them [Republic Services] that authority. Until that’s [franchise agreement] up we can’t change it because it’s a contractual agreement.”

Well, sort of.

Republic Services has been busy in recent years modifying its franchise agreement all over the valley. In the late 1990s, when the company won its decades-long extensions, it sold the idea by touting its great service, including rare twice-weekly trash pickup. Elected officials took the bait and signed on the dotted line.

But now, in Henderson, North Las Vegas and Las Vegas, the company has been steadily working to abandon twice-weekly pickup. Instead, it has struck agreements to pick up trash only once per week, and pick up recycling once per week. (The deal is sweetened with so-called “single stream” recycling, in which all materials – newspapers, glass and plastic bottles, cans, etc. – are placed into a single, big container instead of the red, white and blue milk crates.)

So instead of coming by twice per week to get the trash and once every other week to get the recycling, the company comes by just twice per week.

(Important safety tip when this happens to you: Try to schedule fish night on the day right before trash day, unless you want your summertime garage smelling like an outer circle of hell.)

So, you see, it is possible to change the franchise agreement before it ends.

Sisolak acknowledges changes are possible if both parties agree. (That’s right; your local elected officials had to sell out your twice-weekly trash pickup before the company could abrogate its original agreement. Only Clark County has yet to modify the pact.)

Sisolak is right in that the real culprit is lengthy contracts in the first place. He wants a five-year review on all such agreements, to give the company incentive to provide good service and local governments an option if they don’t.

“It’s hard to hold their feet to the fire when the franchise agreement is so long,” he said.

Indeed, that’s a problem. Another problem is the propensity of generous campaign donors such as Republic to get the laws they want, enforced the way they want, while regular people like Lyle Lyddon get the shaft.

It is what it is. Indeed.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at (702) 387-5276 or SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.