Automated Trash Carts - Another Cauthen Folly

KC City Manager, Wayne Cauthen, was determined to provide trash carts in order to address neighborhood littering, and dumping. It was a time of serious budget challenges and the investment in these carts was not small. Members of the Neighborhood Advisory Council hosted a "Trash Forum" to advise how expensive this was going to be. But good sense be damned, we now have trash trucks with an automated arms, pilot neighborhoods have beautiful blue carts (owned, maintained and replaced by the City). However, the trash men won't use them.....it takes too much time. The trash men roll the carts to the trucks, manually take the bags out of the carts and toss the bags into the truck and roll the carts back. Sometimes they don't even move the carts, just pluck the bags and it's business as usual. Trash that didn't make it into the bag stays at the bottom of the cart sort of a mini landfill on wheels. Do we get extra carts when it is filled up to the brim? Kind of an analogy of our landfill challenge. Is this a $400,000.00 folly?

One positive aspect is that we shouldn't have to pay out too much for maintaining the automated arm and hydraulics on the trucks other than for atrophy. We can hardly wait for the $2,000,000.00 roll out.

This could be nothing, but another curious aspect to this is that when this is reported to "311", the City Manager's Action Center, there's no follow up. Could this be a cover up?