Mayor Garner's sanitation solution is a good one for the whole community.

New Albany’s Great Sanitation Debate of 2005 probably will exhibit a half-life of at least 23 months, stretching through the general election of 2007, at which time the efficient, technocratic privatization of our formerly city-run sanitation service will be portrayed by a motley collection of local extremists as roughly commensurate with the St. Valentine’s Day massacre ordered by Al Capone, or worst yet in the eyes of our braying native obstructionists, the city council vote in favor of Scribner Place.

The unspeakable horror of progress ...

We may expect these tattered Bloody Shirts to be waved with steadily lessening vigor for many years to come, long after the city’s current sanitation department has been absorbed en masse by Clark-Floyd Landfill LLC/Eco-Tech LLC and it becomes clear that the majority of New Albany residents have not chosen to stake the future of the city on the solitary issue of garbage collection, and longer still after Scribner Place has become an accepted and much utilized component of a revitalized downtown.

NA Confidential confines its comments to noting with respect and pleasure that an activist mayor has endured the crass politicization of an important issue, ducked the salvos of mud slung by those doing the politicizing, sifted through enormous collections of facts and figures, resolved the pressing problem of a congenitally dysfunctional city department, and done so in a manner that will not result in a loss of jobs.

That’s an exemplary way to earn one’s pay.

And where were the city council’s Duke Boys, Dan Coffey and Steve Price, during all this? We seem to recall a secret plan, although it may be that they're saving the pumpkin patch (and Whitaker Chambers) for future use in their re-election campaigns.

There remains the significant matter of Rumpkegate and the possibly felonious (and palpably false) sanitation bid "leaks" dribbled by a councilman or confederate to a trusting fellow blogger, who continues to spin Fortuna's Wheel on a daily basis with regard to her "official" account of the tawdry ethical lapse that she herself prompted through an unseemly eagerness to be viewed as an insider.

Actually, to our way of thinking, perhaps the single most welcomed ethical aftereffect of the sanitation changeover lies in the long overdue removal of a department that traditionally has been a wild and wooly refuge for political patronage of the old-fashioned sort that appeals with maximum sentimentality to the unreconstructed ward heelers among local politicos.

Could it be that the motives of at least some of the movers and shakers actively seeking to be depicted as knights in shining armor, heroically riding to the rescue of the besieged sanitation department, always had more to do with the impending cost to their own political influence, especially in the context of future political campaigns, and far less with the welfare of the workers?

Jus' R 'pinion, mind you.

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Side note 1: All ex-aides to former mayors are invited to join the discussion. We're all here to learn.

Side note 2: $$$$$$$$, does this adequately answer your "fiefdom" question? I've just been waiting for a good time, and fearing that I'd be censored in yonder spitwad blogyard.