Residents may voice their concerns about the City Manager’s lack of adequate service provisions to prevent the accumulation of garbage throughout the entire city by contacting their respective city council members.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Six thousand pounds of garbage was permitted to accumulate in just two of the city’s public spaces without any intervention or regular cleaning by CCG.

The trash was recently collected by a large group of volunteers through the Keep Columbus Beautiful Commission — a subordinate branch of CCG — who were generous enough to literally pick up after the city government’s shortcomings. 

Despite the hard work from the volunteers — for which we are very thankful — the City of Columbus quite obviously has no plan to prevent the garbage from accumulating in the first place, nor a plan for its regular collection.

Officials seem to miss the point that the city is covered in thousands and thousands of pounds of garbage every other day of the year as they continue to proclaim how aMaZiNg the place is.

A PUBLIC/PRIVATE FAILURE

The cleanup was conducted by the Keep Columbus Beautiful Commission, Inc., which is a private 501c (3) organization. The private organization is “partnered” with the city through a “Public/Private Partnership” and maintains a “.gov” website though the city’s columbusga.gov url.

The reason for the government website — and despite the misnomer of allegedly being solely a non-profit organization — is because the “partnership” actually established the Keep Columbus Beautiful Commission as a bona fide subordinate branch of the Columbus Consolidated Government through Columbus Ordinance No. 22-057.

The organization is also listed on the Columbus Department of Public Works website right beside Integrated Waste in the website’s menu bar, implying that it is the city’s sole resource for cleaning up garbage, litter, and debris that isn’t household integrated waste.

The Department of Public Works, mind you, is of course the responsibility of City Manager Isaiah Hugley.

You’d think after 18 years in service, Hugley would at least have trash collection figured out so the city isn’t a walkable landfill.

But he doesn’t.

THE BOTTOM LINE

According to Guidestar, the mission of Keep Columbus Beautiful Commission, Inc. is:

“To engage and educate individuals to take greater responsibility for enhancing beautification, protecting the environment, and eliminating litter and blight.”

Given that there are still thousands upon thousands of pounds of trash just about anywhere you look throughout the entire city, it’s fairly obvious that the city’s approach to governing a city through “public/ private partnerships” isn’t cutting it.

Despite the city’s continuous yet obviously-erroneous claims of how “tourism” is saving the city’s economy, CCG quite clearly isn’t even capable of producing a functional method for trash collection for its own residents — let alone for their unrealistic expectations of having all of these so-called tourists hanging about.

Perhaps city officials should consider that the nepotistic small-town partnerships they erroneously cling to are in fact the very things preventing them from achieving their goals.

No one is coming to a city covered in six thousand pounds of trash.

Not to mention: what’s the homicide rate again?

How aMaZiNg.

Residents may voice their concerns about the City Manager’s lack of adequate service provisions to prevent the accumulation of garbage throughout the entire city by contacting their respective city council members.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

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