Leave it to the City of Amarillo to fail when it comes to exercising common sense.
This week, the Amarillo City Council voted to create an Amarillo trash cart program. Next week, Councilmembers will purchase the carts for the program at a cost of over a quarter of a million dollars.
While this has been going on, we have continually heard from City of Amarillo leadership about how cost effective it would be to shut down the chipping sites in Amarillo. But, yet, we have a quarter of a million dollars to blow on trash carts? Why didn't we just keep using the dumpsters that we already owned?
But, that's not the way government accounting works.
In the opinion of this writer, it's clear that the chipping site closings were not about saving money. No amount of pandering, excuses or complaints from City cheerleaders will change the fact that there is a glaring contradiction in the idea of saving money, when the City has no problem blowing a quarter of a million bucks on plastic trash carts.
My hope is that we will eventually see some type of economic common sense exercised by the City Council. I won't be holding my breath though.
-Thomas Warren III, Editor-in-Chief
