A City Obsessed With Garbage Cans

Recently my phone rang. The caller ID identified the caller as City of Palm Bay. I answered and was connected to a live call in meeting with the Palm Bay Mayor John Mazziotti.
Lee Feldman Our $202,301.84 a year City Manager was babbling in the background basically setting up the questions by callers for the Mayor. Feldman seemed amazed as he stated several times that over 8,ooo people were participating
I guess they were also interrupted from their daily routine to listen to the City leaders blowviate. The overwhelming majority of questions
I heard asked, concerned the Trash Carts. Everything from "Why did we do this" in their old Yankee accented voice to "the cans are too big for my garage". And then there were the callers whining about how Melbourne gets two pick ups a week and they got the waste management company to pay for the cans. These garbage cans seem to have really pissed off our residents. I have been here for quite a while and I do not remember a topic that has taken hold like this. Garbage cans imagine that with all the problems we have garbage cans gets the masses going.
The calls would move to a new topic usually some geezer bitching about the cars going
too fast down Port Malabar Blvd then swerve right back into the garbage cans. "Mr. Mayor why do people have to store their cans where
I have to see them from the street". Mr. Mazziotti " I am a senior citizen on a fixed income and these cans are too big for me to roll down the driveway by myself". " There is not enough room in one can for all my garbage".
There were a couple of callers with Caribbean accents complaining about the drainage or shrubs that were too high. Then back to the Garbage cans. "Mr. Mayor my neighbor fills his cans too high and the lid does not go down and raccoons get in and then he just leaves the garbage on the ground". It just went on and on about the new garbage cans price, pick up and peoples habits. The town is just not embracing the new garbage carts the way Lee Feldman and the mayor are.
How about some questions like this: Mr. Mayor My street is a mess and has been a pot hole ridden semi dirt road for years what are the plans. How about a decent plan that the city would back like we have had and passed by popular vote in the past. Instead of the last one you tried to get the voters to support that was full of so much total bullshit. It was a financial joke. Even worse then your garbage can deal. How about instead of making nice pretty medians with landscaping that needs maintenance and upkeep we spend the money on just a basic road for some. The landscaping looks nice but if you polish a turd it is still a turd. We need basic roads not pretty shrubs in the median. Basic concrete would have been fine. Vacant houses line our streets many get broken into by teens who party in them and
cause vandalism. Many are missing the AC Unit which gets stolen. How about The City start making the banks responsible for the houses they own. Your code enforcement patrol has no problem harassing every other citizen in town.
Oxycodone is now the big drug around here how about a plan to prevent pill mills. The crowd at the Central Florida Treatment Center on Palm Bay Rd. overflows the parking lot every day with our Oxy addicted neighbors trying to kick the habit.
Have you been to
the Winn Dixie shopping Center across from the City hall lately? Since the movie theater reopened it is back to the mobs of young teens roaming around like a pack of dogs or herds of cattle wandering around aimlessly, And the police are right there at the PAL. Would you feel safe letting your wife shop at
Bealls after dark with all those punks hanging around?
Exactly how much money $ are those red light cameras bringing in? It has to be some serious coin because the one by Walgreens on Malabar and San Filipo flashes like a strobe light at a cheap disco. The City claims they are for our own safety.
Yeah right. Most research finds they make the intersections dangerous as the knuckle head in front of you slams on his breaks. It is just another way to squeeze some more cash from us. Where is all that cash going? And will the police be paragliding around town any time soon.
What are we going to do about the old homosexuals hanging out at Castaway point or at the park that is all

the way down at the very end of Malabar Road? Castaway Point is such a nice place to go to, except after dark. Between the old homos and the homeless that come out after the sun goes down,you had better load up the fishing gear and get the hell out.
All of the new business
opening up off of Palm Bay Rd. are in West Melbourne. We get nicer places to shop and more traffic and West Melbourne reaps in the tax revenue.
Yet we still dream about the OZ development over by Micco Rd. once that new I95 ramp is built. We can not even take care of what we have, yet we want more. So many still just want the very basic things like a road. Just a road that does not destroy their car or is so bad their children can not even ride a bike or rollerskate on. Just the basics please.

Pay the Man or We are Taking Your Can

I guess it is about time I talked about our beautiful new garbage cans that our City in it's infinite wisdom plunked down 3.1 million dollars for.
Well they did not actually fork over the cash , they got the deal financed through Bank of America. Wasn't that nice of them. People have been pissed about this for a while and I just have not been keeping up with the blog, but email after email concerns the Garbage cans. Now here we are in Feb. and some people have not paid their bills. Seems like they are going a little crazy over there at the City hall. They not only have sent out late notices twice which threaten to repo your cans, but now have even used the reverse 9-1-1 emergency system. The system normally employed to alert residents to emergencies was used to inform 2,800 delinquent, quarterly-billed garbage collection customers that trash and recycling carts would be picked up if bills weren't paid. Sounds like an emergency to me how about you? So the City will start repoing your trash cans.
Your trash will not be picked up if your bill is unpaid. This whole Garbage can deal stinks like old garbage and has since
City Manager Lee Feldman and the rest of the knuckle heads in City Hall rammed this down our throats like a Democratic Congress passing Obamacare. We have pickup once a week now instead of twice and we save a whole what? .45cents. Brilliant!
The main goal was to comply with the state-mandated recycling goals which need to be in place by 2020
and to lock in a price for 10 years of Service. Did we solicit bids from other companies just dying to get our business? Why do I think that this whole deal is going to end up costing us the tax payers so much more.
Now I know Palm Bay pretty well and it does not take a rocket scientist to know that if you quit picking up some of our fine residents garbage it will either pile up in front of their house with the rest of the crap that is already there,

like the car that has not moved in a year or the old BBQ and riding lawn mower that's been parked in front of the house since 2005. They will just dump it somewhere in the woods around town. There already is a whole lot of trash dumped in vacant lots and you can see the trash that lines the roads just about everywhere in Palm Bay.
This town has so many other problems that need to be taken care of that I was not aware that trash pick up was such a pressing issue that we needed to finance cans at Bank Of America. Speaking of Bank of America have you ever been in one of their branches? The majority of the signs are in Spanish.
It kind of makes you wonder what America they are the Bank of. South? Central or the United States of America?

Maybe the History Channel, Discovery or A&E can come out with a new reality show featuring Palm Bay trash cart repos.
Pay the Man or We are Taking Your Can featuring Lee Feldman as the repo man.