City Budget Cost-Cutting Ideas

[ryan_mcgreal]

Okay, SSP, put on your thinking caps: I'm looking for practical ideas the city can use to cut its municipal budget while actually improving overall service.

The idea could involve delivering a service more efficiently or in a different way, or in a manner that is more socially or environmentally constructive, but you're not allowed to just stop doing something the city currently does.

Here's a boring idea from me to get things started: continue to collect recycling and green waste once a week, but start collecting garbage only once every two weeks. This accomplishes a few goals:

1. Reduce operating cost to collect garbage.
2. Spur higher level of waste diversion through passive incentive of people not wanting garbage to sit around for two weeks.
3. Less heavy-handed and authoritarian than enforcing bag limits.

This has proven to be successful in other cities at achieving very high diversion rates.