It's Vern's idea, not mine

While the city's bean counters still try to come up with ways to pinch every last penny, here's a suggestion I got from my rural cousin, Vern.
Vern says fire the city's trash hauler.
Vern is pretty ignorant, but he's not that ignorant because he used to live in the city.
Now that he lives in the country, he pays for his own trash pickup.
Vern doesn't really care how I get my trash picked up and he doesn't care about how much I pay in taxes. He does care how long it takes him to come over to my house on any given evening so he can try to sponge a dinner from me.
Well, he happened to come down my street on trash pickup day. As my neighbors can tell you, after the trash haulers come through, there's usually trash containers littering the streets. Driving a car sometimes can be like maneuvering a mine field.
Vern says he wouldn't pay a dime for that kind of service.
I almost told him I don't pay for it.
Ain't I an idiot.
I figure the city's spending at least a quarter million on trash pickup that's substandard, by Vern's standards. He says the hauler he hired never misses a day, is courteous, puts the containers back where they came from and even comes back to pickup if he puts his garbage out a bit late.
Then I got to thinking. The little old lady who puts out a half-filled trash can is getting nailed, tax-wise, the same as the city resident who puts out four trash cans.
Vern says in the country, you basically pay on the basis of how much trash you want picked up.
So you pay more if you want unlimited pickup, you pay less if you don't.
Even if this might cost more than the per capita tax dollars each city resident has to pay, where's it say that city residents should be entitled to free, private trash pickup as part of city services. That's just a throwback to the times when the city ran its own trash pick up.
The argument would be that we can deprive citizens of a city service. But that's what happened when someone figured out that leaf pickup was too expensive.
So what's the big deal.
Besides, most big trash hauling companies have historic ties to organized crime.
Why should city tax dollars subsidize that?