Public Comment

A “trash cabinet” pilot program funded by the city and local businesses aims to "neaten" downtown by locking up trash bins.

Buried in the "innovative or eyesore" take on this proposal is the real target: recyclers making a hard but honest living off our waste. 

The "innovator" is John Caner, CEO of the Downtown Berkeley Association, famous for having his backroom flights of fancy wander onto the Berkeley City Council's agenda in no time flat without time-consuming visits to lengthy, tedious commission meetings or anything representing participatory democracy. 

Notice that you are paying for this "pilot project" whether you had a chance to hear about it or not, much like the involuntary data-sucking kiosks that make money off of your purchasing patterns. This is your local government, whether you saw it coming or not. 

The eviction moratorium is over, unlike the pandemic. The more important public health issues, such as secondhand smoke exposure and the absence of hand-washing facilities and bathrooms, are apparently not interesting enough to even bother with the obvious signage sitting in boxes at city hall or the option of insisting that the university turn the water back on at People's Park. 

In those public-free Business Improvement District back rooms, it doesn't matter what the public thinks, or that their "jail the garbage" policy hurts the most vulnerable. They're unelected. They're unaccountable. They're publicly funded. They know whom they are after. 

Putting garbage cans in jail to confound recyclers is just dumb. But the depth of the dumbth is in the accompanying photo, which shows a recycler smoking by the garbage jail, obviously finding enough garbage to stay afloat. And content to risk a $100 fine because nobody in Mayor Jesse Arreguin's administration cares enough to even put up the signage sitting in boxes ready to go. Remember his slogan when he runs for state office: Jail the Garbage! And he doesn't just mean the cans.