What’s amazing about our two-week garbage crisis is that Jacksonians handled it so well.
The free market kicked in. Private enterprise prevailed. Impromptu companies sprang up charging $15 a week to pick up trash.
The Northside Sun has a commercial dumpster as all businesses are required to have. The smallest dumpster available is way more than we need. I just threw my bags of garbage in my car and took them to work. I told many of my friends to use the Sun’s dumpster and they did. This past week, it was almost filled to the brim, but it was fine.
This was a mess of Mayor Lumumba’s own making. Anyone blaming the city council is not paying attention. Unfortunately, most people don’t pay attention.
Lumumba would rather have a crisis, be in the limelight and then speechify about racism and appear to be standing up for the exploited. It’s just a big act. Former Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo has nothing on Lumumba. Both are excellent political panderers.
The height of Lumumba’s pandering was blaming the mess on racism. Say what? There are two whites on the city council, one voted with Lumumba, the other against. Two blacks voted for Lumumba; two voted against him and one black abstained. How can that possibly be racist? The only racist in the room was Lumumba.
For the record, I detest categorizing people by their race. As Hallie Selassie, a founding father of Ethiopia once said, “The color of a person’s skin should be no more significant than the color of their eyes.” (By the way, I am three percent African American myself!) It is Lumumba who is forcing me to talk in racist terms because he projects race everywhere he goes.
I hope Lumumba soon retires or is retired as mayor. I wish him the best of luck in creating his independent African nation. I think Kush is what he calls it. Go for it Chokwe! Such endeavors would be more within your skill set than managing a city the size of Jackson.
All Lumumba had to do was work cooperatively with the city council, as every other mayor before him has done. But just like the water crisis, procrastination, obfuscation and devastation is his modus operandi.
Lumumba and his hand-picked staff created an RFP process. RFP stands for “Request for Proposal” but I believe it better stands for “Related Friends and Pals.”
First off, asking each company to submit their own individual RFP is nuts. Each company will then present a different proposal changing such variants as number of pickups, types of carts, types of trucks, personnel per truck, etc. With each company presenting a different proposal, objective comparisons are impossible. It’s flawed from the get go.
There is a proper way to do this. Lumumba should have worked with the council to develop bid specifications. These specifications lay out what the city requires in a waste management company. In other words, the city states what it wants and then the companies have to bid based on the city’s requirements.
Each bidder would have to submit a performance bond so the city could collect damages if a company fails. Only legitimate companies with a track record would be able to get bonded.
Then you open the sealed bids in a big ceremony. The low bidder is the winner. (Some European companies take the second lowest bidder, presuming the lowest bidder was cutting corners somehow.)
Indeed, if the state of Mississippi had decent bidding laws like all successful states do, this process would have been mandated by state law. Bad on the state legislature for not doing this. Why? Because there’s too much money and favoritism in the billions in state and local government contracts.
As just one example, progressive states (and the federal government) require a sealed bidding process. The winner is “the lowest responsive bidder.” Not so in the Magnolia state. Our state standard is “the lowest and best bid.” In my experience the “best” part is defined by who has the best political connections with the politicians controlling the bidding process.
Nevertheless, three companies presented RFPs to the mayor. The mayor’s hand-picked committee then evaluated the proposals based on the mayor’s criteria. Richard’s Disposal was the lowest in price, but they got hammered on the other factors (experience, carts, delivery schedule and what not.)
Despite coming in last, the mayor tried to force the council to approve Richard’s proposal. The council, seeing through this scam, refused. At that point, any other mayor, seeing he lacked the council votes, would have backed down and presented the winner of the RFP process, Waste Management, a company that for years has successfully and competently disposed of Jackson’s waste.
But not Mayor Lumumba, he shouted out racism and created more negative headlines about Jackson throughout the national media. The public relations harm to our city is incalculable.
The height of hypocrisy was when Lumumba had the nerve to accuse the council of “contract steering” when, in fact, that was exactly what Lumumba was doing. The Nazi’s number one propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, postulated the theory that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” This is one trait that our current mayor has in common with one of our recent ex presidents.
Nevermind that Richard’s Disposal had just been kicked out of New Orleans for doing a lousy job. Nevermind that a Northside Sun online poll voted four to one for Waste Management over Richard’s Disposal.
When in doubt, sue. And that’s what Lumumba did, furthering the resolution of the crisis. He took it all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court where he lost nine to nothing. You would think that would humble the mayor and he would then give the city council the time of day. But no . . . he did nothing, waited for another crisis and sued again.
On Monday, that suit was settled when Jackson city councilman Aaron Banks caved and voted for Richard’s. To the council’s credit, they saved over a million dollars in lower costs and reduced the contract period from six years to one. Even so, the intractable mayor got his way, which is just not right.
At least there will now be over one million dollars less finding its way into the pockets of Lumumba’s cronies.
