No need to build a fire: Trash pickup questions answered by Ecotech/SIWS.

Looks like Wild Bill Allen has bulk items for bundling.

Like I keep saying, when the paper's not staging cooking promotions or binge watching reality television, it can actually publish useful tidbits. Click through, evade the same tired circus sideshow ads, and read the whole article.

New Albany trash, garbage pickup questions answered; Storm in March delayed trucks, by Chris Morris (Eastside Tidings)

NEW ALBANY — There has been some confusion among New Albany homeowners about what kind of trash will be picked up by Ecotech/SIWS on a weekly basis.

Bryan Slade, president of Ecotech/SIWS, told the New Albany Board of Public Works & Safety on Tuesday that his crews have been working six days a week picking up bulk items from residents. He said a storm in March put his trucks behind and they are just now getting caught up.

"After those storms we collected 74 tons of material," he said. "It put us behind."

Slade also said there has been some confusion in what his trucks will pick up on a weekly basis, which includes:

• Weekly garbage pickup

• Total of 10 bags and or bundles of limbs

• Branches and limbs must be less than three feet long and no larger than three inches diameter, tied and bundled.

• All yard waste must be placed at the curb or in alley, wherever garbage is picked up prior to 7 a.m. on the regular pickup day

• Bags of grass and leaves cannot weigh more than 50 pounds

Slade said some homeowners are confused about items that his trucks will not pickup which is regulated by city ordinances. Those items include large tree branches, stumps, lumber, construction materials, appliances using Freon and hazardous liquid items like oil based paint or medications.

Ecotech/SIWS will collect up to three large, bulk items at a time. Slade said it's important for residents to call 812-944-4018 to make an appointment to have the bulk items collected. He said trucks do travel throughout the city, but it is easier if they know where the items to collect are located. The bulk items need to be placed where the regular trash is collected by 6 a.m. Trucks will pick up one tire at a time, but it must be off the rim.

Slade also told the BOW that his crews have had issues recently with needles being placed in garbage and are taking precautions.

"Safety is our number one concern," he said.

Garbage will be picked up a day later than normal next week due to Monday being Memorial Day ...

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Incompatibility City ... with a 2014 preamble.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Incompatibility City.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Rain or shine, NABC’s 7th annual Fringe Fest provides an oasis of beer-driven sanity amid the bedlam. This column originally was published on October 17, 2013. This year, I'll take the chance or "rewinding" it prior to the weekend, safe in the knowledge that reconfirmation is pending. But indulge me as I repeat a rant posted on various Facebook threads, and allow me to explain something.

I'm not just throwing punches blindly. The object is to raise enough hell that this issue of Harvest Homecoming's future composition doesn't languish in back rooms for another whole year, and if it requires me to make a complete ass of myself to make progress toward adjusting Booth Days to prevailing downtown realities, then it's a trade-off I can make with a clear conscience. 

I've never said HH volunteers don't work hard. I've never said that they don't do good things. I've never said I want HH to disappear. Rather, what I've said is that HH needs to change with the times as it specifically pertains to the Parade and Booth Days -- and especially the latter. Many people disagree ... but quite a few agree, too, and so city government needs to get off its cowering butt and be pro-active about brokering reforms. 

It sickens and offends me that those downtown entities putting the most skin in the "doing" game remain marginalized by HH's half-century-old business model. This is why I'm yapping, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sorry at all if it bugs you. 

Now, on with the rewinding.

---

As practiced in the art of sedition, as opposed to seduction, it is now time for me to report on the current atmospheric condition in New Albany, where we’re all here because we’re not all there.

Most importantly, Harvest Homecoming’s shelf life has reached its blessed annual end, and all we need do now is spend our remaining autumn weekends picking up the discarded garbage and assorted detritus of (fill in the blank with persistently inflated numbers) weekend visitors, few of whom were able (or cared) to see what defines downtown 361 days out of the year, because the fest’s hoary and increasingly suspect business model does not support recognition, much less engagement, with alien concepts like downtown revitalization.

On Monday morning, I put it this way:

Downtown business owners commiserated on Twitter, welcoming a resumption of the daily working world. It's a reminder that New Albany's version of Groundhog Day occurs in early October. When Harvest Homecoming is here, the blinders are donned with a speed hitherto unwitnessed. City Hall (any one of them, actually, dating back to the Ford Administration) emerges with trepidation into Hauss Square, is abruptly terrified that it might see its own shadow -- and then we get six more years of status quo.

Seeing as America’s version of Labor Day was removed from its worldwide play date of May 1 so as to better expunge the taint of deadly socialism, the latter generally referred to nowadays as “Obamacare,” perhaps it makes perfect sense for New Albany’s Groundhog Day to take four full days, not one, and to happen when the leaves are falling.

In our municipality’s case, it isn’t workers’ rights but uncomfortable irony that bedevils the citizenry, second only to bed bugs, and so the dire threat posed by ironic detachment must be recast into simpler truths, like the prevailing fiction that Harvest Homecoming has anything whatever to do with economic development apart from the money necessary to perpetuate the fest itself.

---

Happily, there was lots of music around town last weekend, some of it engaged by Harvest Homecoming’s internal trendsetters (remember how Starship had that one big hit, since judged one of the worst pop songs in history, and resting atop the charts before many readers were even born?), and the remainder hired and promoted by downtown’s existing, redefining, paradigm-changing 365-days-a-year businesses.

Consequently the sweetest tune to my ears was being played this week, after the festival concluded, coming in the dulcet tones of Harvest Homecoming’s reigning apparatus murmuring morose dismay at smaller evening crowds on the waterfront – you know, the place where there’s a tent with no good beer, which of course reflects the prehistoric ethos of the 1980s … hence the sheer, enduring embarrassment of touting the theme “We Built This City” when the ideas purporting to serve as framework for the construction site are as stale as the rancid frying oil currently coating downtown’s one-way streets.

It’s okay by me. They’ll just blame it on Wick’s, not Fringe Fest. Maybe that’s why the most popular game in town during Harvest Homecoming wasn’t the free throw shoot on Market, but the target shooting on State, as fire and police arms of the same city previously granting Wick’s permission to operate in defiance of orange-clad hegemony spent the weekend harassing it.

Meanwhile, the Harvest Homecoming takeaway never changes, does it?

Harvest Homecoming relies on a business model that once made slight sense, but doesn’t any longer. For Harvest Homecoming’s current business model to succeed, it must be imposed on a geographical area with which it openly conflicts, in which a new generation of businesses are leading downtown’s revival all year long, not just a few groundhogged-up days in fall.

This lamentable conflict gets worse every year, and it can be mediated by only one entity: City government. After all, Harvest Homecoming takes place as it does, where it does, because the city allows it – not only that, but also subsidizes it. But downtown no longer provides a conveniently empty slate upon which Harvest Homecoming can deploy its own extractive business model to the detriment and marginalization of pre-existing, heavily invested, daily models.

City government simply must be active in brokering solutions, and yet no communication is facilitated. This year the rancor was at an all-time high.

Is anyone listening?

---

You can bet at least one councilman isn’t.

In yet another weekly outbreak of hilarity, it was revealed that Bob Caesar is so tone deaf that he knows only two tunes. One of them is "The 'In' Crowd" -- and the other one isn't.

As a well-scrubbed member of the dominant “leadership” caste, one who doesn’t know what it means to live paycheck to paycheck, CM CeeSaw first regarded bridge tolls as no problem, and now believes yard waste pick-up fees are a breeze, too. His cluelessness was amply rewarded with multiple, scathing comments at the newspaper’s web site, where it got so bad for the self-appointed Emperor of the Street Grid that even Emma took him down:

“I have stood up for you in the past against people who agree with that Baylor guy all the time, but no more. This time, I'm with Baylor. You are OUT OF TOUCH, buddy."

See? I’m really not the only one.

Happy News and Tribune metered paywalling, dear readers. Alabama pensioners deeply appreciate your solicitude and oblivious New Albanism. After all, they're there -- not here.

ON THE AVENUES: Incompatibility City.

ON THE AVENUES: Incompatibility City.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

As practiced in the art of sedition, as opposed to seduction, it is now time for me to report on the current atmospheric condition in New Albany, where we’re all here because we’re not all there.

Most importantly, Harvest Homecoming’s shelf life has reached its blessed annual end, and all we need do now is spend our remaining autumn weekends picking up the discarded garbage and assorted detritus of (fill in the blank with persistently inflated numbers) weekend visitors, few of whom were able (or cared) to see what defines downtown 360 days out of the year, because the fest’s hoary and increasingly suspect business model does not support recognition, much less engagement, with alien concepts like downtown revitalization.

On Monday morning, I put it this way:

Downtown business owners commiserated on Twitter, welcoming a resumption of the daily working world. It's a reminder that New Albany's version of Groundhog Day occurs in early October. When Harvest Homecoming is here, the blinders are donned with a speed hitherto unwitnessed. City Hall (any one of them, actually, dating back to the Ford Administration) emerges with trepidation into Hauss Square, is abruptly terrified that it might see its own shadow -- and then we get six more years of status quo.

Seeing as America’s version of Labor Day was removed from its worldwide play date of May 1 so as to better expunge the taint of deadly socialism, the latter generally referred to nowadays as “Obamacare,” perhaps it makes perfect sense for New Albany’s Groundhog Day to take four full days, not one, and to happen when the leaves are falling.

In our municipality’s case, it isn’t workers’ rights but uncomfortable irony that bedevils the citizenry, second only to bed bugs, and so the dire threat posed by ironic detachment must be recast into simpler truths, like the prevailing fiction that Harvest Homecoming has anything whatever to do with economic development apart from the money necessary to perpetuate the fest itself.

---

Happily, there was lots of music around town last weekend, some of it engaged by Harvest Homecoming’s internal trendsetters (remember how Starship had that one big hit, since judged one of the worst pop songs in history, and resting atop the charts before many readers were even born?), and the remainder hired and promoted by downtown’s existing, redefining, paradigm-changing 365-days-a-year businesses.

Consequently the sweetest tune to my ears was being played this week, after the festival concluded, coming in the dulcet tones of Harvest Homecoming’s reigning apparatus murmuring morose dismay at smaller evening crowds on the waterfront – you know, the place where there’s a tent with no good beer, which of course reflects the prehistoric ethos of the 1980s … hence the sheer, enduring embarrassment of touting the theme “We Built This City” when the ideas purporting to serve as framework for the construction site are as stale as the rancid frying oil currently coating downtown’s one-way streets.

It’s okay by me. They’ll just blame it on Wick’s, not Fringe Fest. Maybe that’s why the most popular game in town during Harvest Homecoming wasn’t the free throw shoot on Market, but the target shooting on State, as fire and police arms of the same city previously granting Wick’s permission to operate in defiance of orange-clad hegemony spent the weekend harassing it.

Meanwhile, the Harvest Homecoming takeaway never changes, does it?

Harvest Homecoming relies on a business model that once made slight sense, but doesn’t any longer. For Harvest Homecoming’s current business model to succeed, it must be imposed on a geographical area with which it openly conflicts, in which a new generation of businesses are leading downtown’s revival all year long, not just a few groundhogged-up days in fall.

This lamentable conflict gets worse every year, and it can be mediated by only one entity: City government. After all, Harvest Homecoming takes place as it does, where it does, because the city allows it – not only that, but also subsidizes it. But downtown no longer provides a conveniently empty slate upon which Harvest Homecoming can deploy its own extractive business model to the detriment and marginalization of pre-existing, heavily invested, daily models.

City government simply must be active in brokering solutions, and yet no communication is facilitated. This year the rancor was at an all-time high.

Is anyone listening?

---

You can bet at least one councilman isn’t.

In yet another weekly outbreak of hilarity, it was revealed that Bob Caesar is so tone deaf that he knows only two tunes. One of them is "The 'In' Crowd" -- and the other one isn't.

As a well-scrubbed member of the dominant “leadership” caste, one who doesn’t know what it means to live paycheck to paycheck, CM CeeSaw first regarded bridge tolls as no problem, and now believes yard waste pick-up fees are a breeze, too. His cluelessness was amply rewarded with multiple, scathing comments at the newspaper’s web site, where it got so bad for the self-appointed Emperor of the Street Grid that even Emma took him down:

“I have stood up for you in the past against people who agree with that Baylor guy all the time, but no more. This time, I'm with Baylor. You are OUT OF TOUCH, buddy."

See? I’m really not the only one.

Happy News and Tribune metered paywalling, dear readers. Alabama pensioners deeply appreciate your solicitude and oblivious New Albanism. After all, they're there -- not here.

New Albany's "Nowhere Man" embraces yard waste fees.

As larger issues swirl like the half-eaten garbage littering the streets after Downtown Displacement Days, Bob Caesar considers normality in the context of proper yard waste fees.

Cluelessness like this begs more questions than I have time to gnaw, but I'm struck by a similarity of cavalier attitude between CeeSaw's typically irrelevant ruminations and his council counterpart Kevin "I don't live paycheck to paycheck" Zurschmiede's recent breathtaking pronouncement that no one in metro Louisville is likely to go out of his way to avoid dollar tolls.

C-minus students, all ... and I grade on a curve.

Yard waste removal fee to be explored in New Albany; Charge would be added for services beyond normal collection

 ... As for the fee, Caesar said he views it as a way for private property owners to avoid having to pay a private contractor for the service.

“I think a lot of people would be happy to pay” to have yard waste removed, Caesar said.

"I wish maybe they'd tear down the walls of this theatre ... let me out, let me out."

For more on the Publican's newly reinvigorated mental health and the scheduling decisions that have enabled it, you'll have to wait until Thursday's "Beer Money" column in the Tribune, although I'll provide a teaser here and now:

I’d been refraining from those twice monthly council performances, and obviously my absences were why the abscesses healed, the gnarly dreams dissipated, my knee abruptly stopped aching, the acne cleared up, and I experienced a boost in intellectual potency approaching that achieved at the “express” chain hotel down the street.

Notice how I skillfully skirted tagging by a copyright lawyer down on his luck somewhere?

Meanwhile, for the rest of you, reality beckons in the form of the council's second of two monthly gatherings tomorrow evening, during which the 6th district councilman will propose an EDIT subsidy for yard waste pickup, thus prompting Steve Price to counter with, "ya now, we oughta just burn that shit like Andy in Mayberry."

Dan Coffey will glower and claim to know more about grass clipping than any human alive, the sole Republican will be sensible, and so on, and so forth.

Three Dog Night stole it from Leo Sayer, but verily:

Oh, I'm so blind
Oh, I'm blind
I wasted time
Wasted, wasted, wasted time
Walkin' on the wire, high wire
But I must let the show go on

Just without me, at least this time. I'm busy planning the comeback tour.

Gahan says New Albany trash deal should be bid-out; SIWS would pickup yard waste, cut monthly rate with new deal, by Daniel Suddeath

With SIWS collecting yard waste, the street department will be able to concentrate on maintaining the city’s roads, (Mayor Doug) England said.

The new deal “will lower the costs to the citizens, freeze the rate for five years and free-up our men in the street department so they can go and actually paint center lines, paint stop signs and do repairs in the city,” he said.