In Wichita, Airplanes Still Roll Off The Assembly Line...Trash Is The Problem Of The Day...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor of The Tribune

WICHITA, Kansas - The fat, 863-page telephone directory in this city of 330,000 residents lists four major companies dealing in residential and business trash collection. A few smaller outfits also compete, offering a variety of other "haulings" for a modest fee. That's important, because the city does not employ a garbage collection army to run the streets piling the week's trash into city trash trucks. Here, it is private enterprise.

Few are happy, however.

Now, the city is fronting a novel solution: Pay-as-you-throw.

What that means is that residents, who have been complaining about the variety of fees being offered by the various trash-hauling companies, will be asked to consider a proposal that will allow them to request either an economical container (the favorite of the senior citizens), or go with the larger family-size container that will admittedly bring a higher cost.

They are also looking at being charged by-the-bag, or by-the-weight of their trash.

Wichita is a city that has flown higher. It is proudly referred to here as the Air Capital of the World. Residents point to well-known aircraft outfits such as Stearman, Cessna, Mooney and Beechcraft, all founded here in the 1920s and early 1930s. Additionally, Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft remain a reliable employer, along with Learjet and Spirit AeroSystems. The city's chamber of commerce also notes that Airbus and Boeing maintain a healthy workforce in Wichita.

And in local sports, its minor league baseball team, the Wichita Wingnuts, currently sits atop the Central Division of the competitive American Association of Independent Professional Baseball with an early-season 12-6 record, following last night's 6-2 win over the Fort Worth Cats. But that's success above ground and on the basepaths.

Down below, it is the garbage that filled a portion of The Wichita Eagle's front page yesterday. Wichita considering pay-as-you-throw trash, read the headline.

Chiming in with its own opinion, the Environmental Protection Agency went on record as saying pay-as-you-throw trash fees actually lead to a decrease in garbage, anywhere from 25 percent to 45 percent, which is a major drop for communities charged with availing and maintaining costly city dumps.

City officials worry that the fees under consideration are too wide-ranging to be fair.

For the moment, residents weigh the options: Less trash, smaller containers, trash by weight. It'll be one of the above. The city is scheduled to consider recommendations later month. It is a novel approach to a problem strangling city budgets from Miami to Seattle. For years, New York City has hired barges to sail its trash away, to New Jersey and to Florida. So perhaps this ambitious experiment being tried here will grab the attention of cities and towns across the country.

If the idea flies, that is.

In a flyboy's town like this one, that's the bottom line...

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