News Notes (November 1972)

Garbage Study Stalled

Lindsay Administration efforts to find out if private carters can pick up garbage cheaper than city sanitationmen have been stalled for five months by staff problems and, according to some sources, politics.

One of the casualties of this tangle so far has been a much-publicized plan to clean up Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant slums by establishing an experimental, private, community-oriented sanitation department there.

In May, Mayor Lindsay established a seven-man committee to try to resolve the controversy over whether public or private sanitationmen could collect city garbage cheaper.

But that committee has only had “a couple of organizational meetings” and hasn’t begun work at all, according to its chairman, Hunter College’s dean of graduage studies, Walter Eisenberg.

Eisenberg said the Mayor’s office was having trouble finding an executive director and enough staff people to study the problem. “We only need a handful of staff members,” he said, “but we’d like to produce a report six months after we begin work, and it’s hard to get qualified people to come work with us for just six months.”

Meanwhile the Bed-Stuy plan, proposed by the five-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, has been waiting for an evaluation from the Mayor’s committee.

Environmental Protection Administrator Jerome Kretchmer and his Sanitation Commissioner, Herbert Elish, have both said they liked the plan.

But they estimate that it could cost $700,000 to $1 million, and no one in the Lindsay Administration is willing to approve an experiment that costly before the Mayor’s Committee reviews it.

Several sources close to the controversy said the Mayor’s office was not working very hard on getting a committee staff because its report could be political dynamite for the Mayor. They argued that if the committee found private cartmen preferable, the Mayor could lose John DeLury’s powerful Sanitationmen’s Union as a political ally in any future campaign.

If, on the other hand, the Committee decided the city’s garbage men were already doing a fine job, Lindsay’s committee could be accused of being self-serving and rejecting a sanitation service that was cheaper and could save taxpayers money.

Ponies vs. Post Office

James Boren, founder of the National Association of Professional Bureaucrats, is confident of beating the U.S. Mail on a Pony Express between Philadelphia and Washington. Says Boren, “It will also bring back fond memories of the days when the postal system used to work. It’s not just the speed of the mails that concerns me—it’s the orderly flow of paper. Bureaucrats do not have an adequate supply of paper with which to busy themselves with maximized shuffling.”

In 1968, impressed by the “creative nonresponsiveness” of the federal bureaucracy, he founded the Association, of which he is presently chief finger-twiddler. The Association’s crest features a ruffled duck strangling in red tape, a sheaf of memos, the motto, “when in doubt, mumble,” and the words “status quo.” Its perfect gift for bureaucrats is a pencil with erasers at both ends.

Boren’s team consists of six riders and eight horses. The make-up of the Post Office team was not available as of press time.

Seeing the Light?

New York Post editorial: A prudent distaste for anarchy has made us reluctant to applaud the commuters who physically barred the path of a Penn Central express and forced themselves aboard. They were rebelling against the collapse of their wayward local and, perhaps more profoundly, against all the cumulative indignities they have endured on that route.

But even while we refrain from urging others to emulate their mutiny, the episode must be recognized as an historic portent. Is the day approaching when hundreds of drivers stalled in insufferable traffic jams will simultaneously abandon their cars and let officialdom worry about removing them? We hesitate to cite the options available to frustrated subway riders. If those who dwell on the affluent side of the railroad tracks have been driven to the tactics of guerilla warfare, who will dare to say that the nation is overcome by apathy?

Is there a closet anarchist on the editorial staff of the venerable New York Post?

Showcase of Democracy

More than 9,000 South Korean youths were picked up and shorn of long hair at police barber shops across the country in two days in a nationwide police crackdown against what authorities call “immoral and decadent” elements. [AP]

By the Balls

Although the Supreme Court has upheld organized baseball’s anti-trust exemption, the Justice Department is investigating possible Sherman Act violations by the Amateur Softball Association of America.

International Friendship

Science writers on a 10-day Russian trip arranged by the State Department had to pay double the cost of their travel and lodgings to subsidize a return visit by Soviet journalists.

Budget Logic

Concerned about a rising country assessment, the Mansfield, Massachusetts Board of Selectmen wrote the Bristol County Commission for an explanation.

The commission chairman, William F. Long, Jr., wrote back the following:

“Our budget is not put together in such a way that we can provide you with a detailed budget breakdown.

“There were extensive cuts made in the 1971 county budget, and the 1972 budget was, therefore, increased to make up for the cuts that were made in 1971.”