Three Colorado Springs City Council members want to mandate better service from the community’s six residential trash haulers. They want performance mandates backed by fines. It’s a garbage idea, and no one can dispute this fact (cheesy pun intended).

On Nextdoor.com are routine threads complaining about garbage service, all over the country. Pickups are late, sometimes by days or weeks, and garbage collectors don’t return calls. These discussions underscore how trash disposal plays a significant role in our lives.

The wafting stench of rotting trash in the summer presents problems such as maggots, flies, raccoons, rats, bears and more. After trash cans fill up, late for pickup, plastic trash bags pile up until animals rip them apart and scatter debris.

Times have changed since the 1980s and ’90s, when television’s Peg Bundy fantasized about her shoe-salesman husband, Al, raising the family’s stature by landing a trash-hauling job in Chicago.

Here in post-pandemic 2022, we don’t have waiting lists of applicants competing to haul trash. Business Insider reports on the desperate efforts by municipalities to hire enough sanitation workers to keep garbage off the sidewalks and streets.

The mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn., took on the trash worker shortage by raising annual wages for drivers from $31,000 to $45,000 overnight. All over the country, municipal and private haulers are throwing money at the problem.

Salary.com finds wages of Colorado-based garbage haulers average between $30,000 and $54,000 a year – putting their pay on par with that of teachers with college degrees and licenses.

If wage increases don’t solve the garbage collector shortage, they haven’t been raised high enough.

“The trouble especially lies with jobs that have to be done in person,” explained Business Insider. It quotes Elon Musk predicting, “in the future, physical work will be a choice” for those who don’t want to work virtually in the comfort of home.

As the work-from-home trend grows – in fields ranging from law to education to counseling to medical billing – garbage workers take less physically demanding options. Upping their pay and benefits and respecting them more is the only way to recruit and retain them.

In the not-so-distant future, we might see “blue-collar” workers earning more than work-from-home or cubicle professionals. Maybe this dilemma shows us why they should. We need them, and they cannot work from home.

The private-sector competition models in Colorado Springs, Boulder and several other Colorado cities and towns are unique. Most cities throughout the country provide residential trash service and have problems as bad, if not worse, than the Springs.

Competition among haulers gives consumers choices. This causes providers to improve service to attract and retain customers. That’s why some companies return trash cans to their storage locations after emptying them. That’s why trash companies fret about their images to the point of painting trucks green and suggesting their service will save Mother Earth.

A new city law, imposing fines on trash companies that don’t meet expectations, won’t achieve a thing. These companies are desperate to improve services without such a rule and don’t need the overhead of fines they will pass to customers.

Public and private trash haulers will resolve this by making trash hauling worth the effort. They will make collecting garbage a job Peg Bundy would brag about. Customers can help by leaving tips for their haulers and thanking them for doing important work in lieu of working from sofas.

Market forces will solve this problem. The proposal for a punitive and futile law epitomizes political pandering. It belongs in the dumpster behind City Hall.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board