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COLUMBUS, Ga. — If you haven’t noticed, there has been a recent problem of an increase in illegal dumping and piles of strewn debris throughout the Fountain City.
The Columbus Consolidated Government under the charge of City Manager Isaiah Hugley now believes it has found a rubbish solution — though the pun is intended.
THE PROBLEM
Back in 2021, the city’s trash collection became literally non-existent for thousands upon thousands of residents. Their household garbage would sit curbside for weeks as it rotted in front of their homes.
Though sporadic pick-up began to occasionally occur, the problem persisted for years.
At the time, Deputy City Manager Lisa Goodwin blamed the problem on — and we could not make this up if we tried — a shortage of criminal inmates available to perform the city’s trash collection detail.
“It was just a perfect storm that created this,” Goodwin said in a 2021 interview with WTVM. “And so, as a result, we had to do something because we were four weeks behind in that pickup."
The third-world level of filth resulted in thousands of residents paying taxes for services their local government was not delivering. Naturally, many of those residents began doing whatever they needed to in order to get that trash away from their homes.
And so the illegal dumping began — all as a result of a government shortcoming.
While we at the Muckraker are in no way condoning the illegal dumping of trash anywhere throughout the city nor anyplace else, it is absolutely vital to understand the objective cause behind the problem at hand — and that objective cause is in fact the reality that the Columbus Consolidated Government failed to pick up the trash for so long that it changed the behavior of residents to compensate for it.
Once that dumping started as a result of CCG’s failure — not the citizens — a change in status quo and cultural norms occurred.
THE RESPONSE
As a result of the widespread illegal dumping throughout the city — which was in fact a direct cause of CCG’s instability to render what is quite possibly the most basic government function imaginable — the city manager’s office has now created an “Illegal Dumping Hotline” so that residents can theoretically report illegal dumping to help ‘solve’ the problem.
Instead of treating the underlying cause, Isaiah Hugley is encouraging residents to effectively rat on their neighbors as if that is somehow going to prevent the crime of dumping from occurring.
Ask yourself: If people aren’t willing to cooperate with the authorities to report the murder of their neighborhood’s children, do you really think a hotline is going to make a difference by reporting someone dumping trash? Seriously?
THE ACTUAL SOLUTION
Instead of relying on Hugley’s non sequitur response which is almost guaranteed to not make one lick of a difference at all, perhaps others in our city’s government who have a slightly greater knack for critical thinking could ponder about a solution that treats the cause instead of the symptom.
That underlying cause might readily be identified through the following line of questioning:
- Why are people illegally dumping their garbage and debris at staggeringly-higher rates in the first place?
- What services does the city already offer to combat this underlying cause?
- How can the city make it easier for people to use the service than it is for them to even bother going about the trouble to load up and dump their trash elsewhere?
- What obstacles are currently preventing the city from rendering those services?
- What line of effort can we deploy to eliminate those obstacles and solve the problem?
If you haven’t followed that, the general idea is to consider the fact that people follow the path of least resistance. If you don’t want them to dump their trash in places it doesn’t belong, then don’t present them with a situation that makes it easier for them to do so.
Instead, make it easier for people to not dump their trash than it is for them to dump it.
But sure: go ahead with this ‘hotline’ instead of rendering the services they’re being taxed and billed for.
How has that worked out for you so far?
THE HOTLINE NUMBER
The hotline number to rat out your neighbor — who is likely sick and tired of not having their garbage collected regularly — is 706-225-3001.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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