The county commission seems intent on grabbing more and more roles for itself.  Recently, the county commission is discussing franchising of trash haulers and possibly imposing new unfounded mandates onto the citizens of this community in the form of mandatory trash recycling. 

Taxpayers should recall that there is a long history of local government failure in the trash business that goes back decades.  The city’s local trash collection efforts were such an abysmal failure that all trash hauling except by the Wichita school board was privatized back in the late 1970’s.  More recently, even Wichita public schools even eliminated their trash trucks.

Franchising is the process whereby the county would select the haulers who would have the monopoly franchise to collect trash from residential and/or commercial businesses (depending how the county structures this) in a certain geographic area.

This seems like an odd idea because the idea of creating government protected monopolies does not have a good or illustrious history in our community or elsewhere.  Supposedly this idea is being proposed to limit rate growth.   The history indicates that higher trash rates are the likely outcome.

There is another example locally.  Look at the soaring city water and sewer rates.  Last year rates went up again about six percent.  Past year city increases have often been in the same percentage range that exceeds inflation and growth.  The city’s monopoly on the sale of water and sewer services has not kept rates down here.

The trend nationally has been to try and create more competitive markets.  The role of government is to establish a fair and level playing feed for producers and consumers to engage in open and fair competition.  We do not need more state sanctioned monopolies.  The myth that “public/private partnerships” work well does not have much in the way of evidence here in Wichita proving that this works.

I am concerned that so many of these “public/private partnerships,” mean that the private sector gets the profits and the public sector gets the bills for taxpayers to cover.

See you out on the campaign trail.