Livin and Dion: Fall River government is addicted to your money

The cops are scraping overdosed, blue-lipped junkies off the sidewalks, and Fall River city government remains focused on trash bags.

When it comes to death, we make it here.

In Fall River, all things meet in the trash.

The drug problem intersects with trash when you look out the window and see a junkie picking the deposit bottles out of your recycling bin. Fall River’s poverty problem meets trash bags at the precise point you need bags but don’t have any money.

Politics intersects with trash continuously, as mayors are made and unmade by trash bags and trash fees. Trash bags are the raw fuel that gets a recall rolling. There’s at least some chance that the divide between mayor and city council will meet at trash bags.

Landlords and tenants intersect when you’re a landlord, and your tenants just plain won’t use the purple bags, and you live 40 miles from Fall River, and now you can’t just collect your Section 8 money and let your buildings fall apart. Your tenants, who can’t be counted on to pay their rent, can’t be expected to learn how to use color-coded trash bags. If they had those kinds of skills, they wouldn’t have to live in your three-decker roach motel.

A few weeks ago, I was writing that I was sick of writing about trash bags, and that maybe I would finally be free. If I was that lucky, would I be sitting in downtown Fall River right now, writing a trash bag column, and having nothing to look forward to except a lunch time frozen burrito?

I would not.

Still, even in what I hoped was my farewell-to-purple-bags column, I said I was going to hang on to the bags, because I figured they’d be back.

Why?

Because any government, having taken your money, is extremely unlikely to give it back. Still paying the “rainwater tax?" I thought so.

So, while you head out to buy another $10 roll of EZ-split bags, let’s consider.

For homeowners, pay-as-you-throw was a kind of last straw. The bags are cheap enough, but they came on top of continuous tax increases and water bills that doubled in less than a decade. For renters, pay-as-you-throw meant that trash wasn’t the landlord’s responsibility anymore. Now, some of that responsibility was yours, and a lot of people in Fall River are responsibility-resistant. If that weren’t true, there’d be far fewer people picking through your trash.

Originally, pay-as-you-throw was one of those “ideas whose time has come,” and those are nearly always dangerous.

Pay-as-you-throw would increase recycling! The polar bears and the elephants would be saved! The city would make some extra revenue.

Of course, once the word “revenue” gets down to you, all it means is a wrinkled $10 bill pulled out of your wallet and given to a store owner. This is true whether it’s called “added revenue” or “additional revenue.” And once the revenue, AKA your greasy little $10 bill, is in the city’s grasp, getting it back is going to take a little more effort than just signing a recall petition in the Walmart parking lot.

For the city, pay-as-you-throw was perfect. If you contract out trash collection, you can forget about any responsibility for picking up garbage, but you still get to charge people for the bags. No responsibility + additional revenue = happy government. This is another place where your leaders intersect with the guy who picks through your barrels. He also wants no responsibility AND money. Your money.

And, a lot of the time, he takes the money and buys some of that warm stuff to put in his arm, or five nips of blueberry vodka and a 20-ounce can of cheap beer.

Sometimes, government does the same thing. They dig a few nickels out of your trash and they spend it on raises or streetscapes, and then they pass out on the sidewalk, and scare your kids when they’re walking home from school.

When the neighborhood junkie passes out on the sidewalk, the ambulance comes to get him and they take him to the hospital, and rehydrate him, and try and patch him up enough to get back to the endless, thankless job of picking through your trash for deposit bottles.

When government passes out on the sidewalk, it is rushed to a fundraiser, where it is pumped full of frosty Heineken and campaign contributions from people who don’t live in Fall River, or who at least don’t live near you. Soon enough, government is back picking through your trash for money.

Make it here!