How About a Garbage Rebate?

Everyone catch this trial balloon being floated by the Daley people?

• Chicago should impose a garbage collection fee -- similar to the freight suburbanites have paid for years -- to close a $420 million budget gap without massive layoffs and service cuts, an influential union leader said Monday.
• A fee of $10 a month from the 600,000 Chicago households that get city garbage pickup would generate $72 million a year. A $15 fee would produce $108 million.

• Aldermen may call it a back-door property tax increase and claim Chicagoans expect refuse collection costs to be covered by their tax bill.

  But the case can also be made that Chicago can no longer afford to provide a free service that costs money almost everywhere else.

We'd like a fee rebate if we don't fill our garbage cans every pick up day then. We compost all of our yard waste, saving the City money. We recycle metal, plastic, paper, cardboard and just about everything else even remotely reusable. If we can sneak a few bags into the neighbor's cans, we can go eight or ten weeks a year without a single pick up.

Or maybe Daley could stop giving away money, crooked contracts, no-show jobs, aldercreature raises, and any of a hundred more schemes and programs that serve no purpose? Or would that make sense?

FOP? Add this to the negotiations where being required to live in the City costs us way too much to keep up with the "raises" that end up being reductions.