Trash Can Postscript

Yesterday's editorial, "Double Default," took the position that no spending in the city should be allocated solely at the discretion of an individual politician. It's a violation of the principle of checks and balances. To underscore the absurdity of the idea, we mentioned the trash cans throughout the city with the names of individual City Council members on them, which make it look as though the Council Member paid for the trash cans, rather than the taxpayers. After the editorial had been issued, we heard from a Council Member whose trash cans we walk by regularly, David Yassky, who passed along a copy of a letter he sent on October 24, 2007, to the commissioner of the department of sanitation.

"Dear Commissioner Doherty," the letter said, "I am writing to ask that you refrain from placing my name on trash cans in my district. While I appreciate the gesture and the acknowledgement of funds from my office, I do not think that taxpayer money should go towards any sort of personal advertisement or self-promotion. The type of trash cans that carry my name are more expensive, and there is a small but real misconception that elected officials pay the extra dollar to have their name displayed. However, the reason I allocate money for this style of receptacle is because is it better for the community — it is a much more substantial container, and the lid design keeps trash from blowing out of the cans and into the street. Removing my name from those bins in my district would alleviate this misconception, and provide community members with peace of mind about the use of their tax dollars."

Mr. Yassky argues that it's reasonable for Council members to fund garbage cans because they know better than some centralized city bureaucrat where the cans are needed. By this logic, the Council members should also serve as the police and prosecutors, because they know better than some central police chief which streets in their districts are most dangerous. By our lights, the idea of assigning Council members to place trash cans is a way to distract them from exercising serious oversight and authority over the serious business of the city. If the $500 Council-member sponsored trash cans are so much better than the standard-issue ones, why not just adopt them for general use throughout the city and save the Council members the need for heroics? If anything, putting Mr. Yassky's name on the trash can underscores the flaw with the process by which the public's money is spent. Mr. Yassky's own characterization of the money in his letter as "funds from my office" captures the problem — as he notes later in the letter, the money does not actually come ultimately from his office, but consists of "tax dollars."

The point here is not to pick on Mr. Yassky, a hard-working councilman and an awfully nice guy to boot. It is that no council member, no matter how hardworking, should have sole discretion over allocating public money. The temptation to misuse the funds or waste them is simply too great, the checks and balances nonexistent. If the average council member has $300,000 a year to spend in this manner, it amounts to a more than $1 million a-term taxpayer-funded incumbency advantage for Council members who tout their belief in the idea of New York as a "model" of campaign finance equality. Mr. Yassky is right that his name doesn't belong on trash cans, but the sad truth is that the labels are one way for taxpayers to gain some insight into the way their money is being spent.