Snow Thoughts From Hawaii

Sitting here on the balcony of my luxurious resort hotel room (graciously paid for by the taxpayers of the Great State of Texas - thanks, y'all) with a cold Longboard in hand, enjoying a postcard-perfect sundown (wispy clouds tinged pink-orange by the setting sun, surf breaking about 5 stories below me, fragrant and exotic scents on the gentle breeze), it's hard to identify with the denizens of New York and their recent struggles with excessive amounts of snow. However, a Michelle Malkin column on that topic prompted me to comment.

...government sanitation and transportation workers were ordered by union supervisors to oversee a deliberate slowdown of its cleanup program — and to boost their overtime paychecks.

...city plowers raised blades “unusually high” (which requires extra passes to get their work done) and refused to plow anything other than assigned streets (even if it meant leaving behind clogged routes to get to their blocks).

When they weren’t sitting on their backsides, city plowers were caught on videotape maniacally destroying parked vehicles in a futile display of Kabuki Emergency Theater. It would be laugh-out-loud comedy if not for the death of at least one newborn whose parents waited for an ambulance that never came because of snowed-in streets.

This isn’t a triumphant victory for social justice and workers’ dignity. This is terrifying criminal negligence.

It's not so much the egregious actions (or non-actions) taken by the NYC sanitation workers union that are disturbing - after all, is anyone really surprised that a union would take advantage of a disaster to improve their situation? - as it is the (again, not surprising) revelation that privatized services are much more efficient and cost effective than government provided services, whether or not they are unionized.

New Yorkers could learn a thing or two from those of us who call Colorado Springs home. We have no fear of being held hostage to a politically driven sanitation department — because we have no sanitation department. We have no sanitation department because enlightened advocates of limited government in our town realized that competitive bidders in the private sector could provide better service at lower cost.

And we’re not alone. As the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan reported: “The largest study ever conducted on outsourced garbage collection, conducted by the federal government in the 1970s, reported 29 to 37 percent savings in cities with populations over 50,000. A 1994 study by the Reason Foundation discovered that the city of Los Angeles was paying about 30 percent more for garbage collection than its surrounding suburbs, in which private waste haulers were employed. A 1982 study of city garbage collection in Canada discovered an astonishing 50 percent average savings as a result of privatization.”

Completely privatized trash collection means city residents don’t get socked with the bill for fraudulently engineered overtime pay, inflated pensions, and gold-plated health benefits in perpetuity — not to mention the capital and operating costs of vehicles and equipment. The Colorado Springs model, as city councilman Sean Paige calls it, is a blueprint for how every city can cope with budget adversity while freeing itself from thuggish union threats when contracts expire or cuts are made. Those who dawdled on privatization efforts in better times are suffering dire, deadly consequences now.

Let the snow-choked streets of New York be a lesson for the rest of the nation: It’s time to put the Big Chill on Big Labor–run municipal services.

Cue Peter, Paul, and Mary: "When will we ever learn...?"

In other snow-related news:

The feds have opened a criminal investigation into allegations that city employees conspired to paralyze the city during last week's blizzard by failing to remove the snow, authorities confirmed today.

The probe launched by the Brooklyn US Attorney's Office comes in response to City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens) revelations to The Post last week that sanitation workers told him they were involved in a work slowdown, sources told The Post.

At the same time, both the Brooklyn and Queens DAs offices have started their own investigations into whether there was a work slowdown.

I'm just guessing here, but I'm willing to bet that the Brooklyn and Queens DAs, plus a few pissed-off feds, live on streets that didn't get plowed.

There's more.

Even the dead can't escape the ineptitude of the city's Sanitation Department.

Sanitation crews dumped tons of dirty snow from the Christmas-weekend blizzard into the city's biggest Jewish cemetery, toppling 21 gravestones and wrecking an iron fence.

Can you imagine the outrage if the union slobs had dumped all that snow on some muslim property? We'd never hear the end of it.

There is, however, a very serious side to all this union nonsense. It's quite likely that heavily unionized states may be forced to default on their bonds, or even declare bankruptcy.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to Washington earlier this year (2010) to get $7 billion for his state government, which resorted to paying off vendors with scrip and delaying state income tax refunds. Illinois seems to be in even worse shape. A recent credit rating showed it to be weaker than Iceland and only slightly stronger than Iraq.

It's no mystery why these state governments -- and those of New York and New Jersey as well -- are in such bad fiscal shape. These are the parts of America where the public employee unions have been calling the shots, insisting on expanded payrolls, ever higher pay, hugely generous fringe benefits and utterly unsustainable pension promises.

One final note: Andy Stern, former head of obama's puppet master SEIU and unqualified member of the deficit commission, voted against the commission's plan for reducing the deficit, effectively killing it.

What the hell a union head was doing on a deficit reduction commission is beyond me, but that's obama for you.

Speaking of obama, my search for his birth certificate continues with renewed vigor. I have definitively ruled out the possibility that it is in any of the bars within a one mile radius of this resort...