[IL Republican]

I live in Normal, which is right next door. We have mandatory trash cans as well, but our dear leaders bought ours for us!

[GraceG]

Simple solution, only have your neighbor sign up for the service, and pay him under the table, enough people do this and the beast will be starved!

[al baby]

With your tax money sucka

[GraceG]

“The city looked at best practices and safe work conditions for the employees and made the choice to go with (automated collections),”

Wow sounds like SEIU was involved in this...

Can’t have the trash men working for a living...

[Buckeye McFrog]

We have mandatory trash cans as well, but our dear leaders bought ours for us!

Your tax dollars going for trash cans supplied by some offshoot of the Soprano crew at 6000% markup, to be laundered right back into Your Local Democrat Party. What a scam!

[ConservativeStatement]

Good thing Henry Blake isn’t around to see this.

[AnalogReigns]

Since modern trash-collection trucks use an hydraulic arm to lift and dump trash bins into them--which therefore have to be a uniform, large size (usually with wheels), this is kind of a non-story. Since this dumpster-style trash collection is superior in nearly all ways--safer, faster, fewer employees, one large trash can in stead of several, it's got wheels so anyone can take the trash out......practically all municipalities around the country are using it.

Getting people to directly pay for their bins too, isn't a bad idea--as I bet fewer bins are damaged or abused that way.....

Public sanitation including trash collection is one legitimate area of government--not constituting a "nanny state."

Now in Charlotte, NC, there WAS a program (quashed due to public outcry) that put a computer chip into recycling bins...in order to monitor if they were being used.... Now THAT for sure is different....and DEFINITELY nanny-statism, and in fact totalitarian.

Just shows how easily something as basic and normal as trash-collection can become--in the wrong government hands...totalitarian and tyrannical.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I live in Normal, which is right next door. We have mandatory trash cans as well, but our dear leaders bought ours for us!

Did they take second jobs waiting tables and delivering newspapers? Cause if the used taxpayer money, you were forced to pay for them, for yourself and everyone else.

[PeteB570]

Fayetteville, NC has similar service. Uniform Trash, Lawn Waste and Recycle bins. Replaced by the city when broken.

The only sore point is the recycle bins are half as large as the trash and lawn waste bins. If you want the larger size you have to buy it.

Which means once the recycle bin is full all the rest of the recycle goes into the trash bin. Oh, well.

[DannyTN]

Usually when trash cans have to be uniform, it’s to support some form of automated pickup.

A $50 one time fee is probably a lot better than bumping your service $5/month and 3 years later you could have bought 3 trashcans.

[napscoordinator]

We in Annapolis, Maryland all have the same exact trash cans but they give them to us. We don’t pay for them (except through property taxes I guess).

[prairie dog]

What this article doesn’t mention is that Bloomington’s garbage crew labor force will eventually be reduced by over 60% by going with the automatic collection method. Many of these workers are in the $90,000+ annual wage/salary range. Quite a savings going from a three man crew to just one on each truck.