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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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I bet this story has 3rd Ward Councilman BB Nolden cringing.
With these problems arising, will there be neighborhood cleanups?
The Flint Journal editorial promotes the idea of privitizing trash. Is there a kickback in it for the Walling administration? Trash is one of the most lucrative and illegal professions. Books and news stories have covered the undercover police stings, retaliation and sabotage among the garbage industry. The Mafia bust in the Detroit area about 10 years ago also included in the FBI records a waste company that burned the trucks of a rival to win a contact.
Walling was in Washington DC when the corruption associated with Anthony Williams and his administration's involvement with non profits came to light. A large number of Williams aides left so as not to be interviewed by the FBI.
Somehow a $20k a week cost overrun became a $ million. Let the unions sort this out.
Illegal trash dumping in Flint intensifiesSaturday, May 01, 2010
Tags:flint, local, autumn perry
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Autumn Perry
More: Bio, E-mail, News Team
FLINT (WJRT) -- (05/01/10) -- Illegal dumping is not a new issue, but some Flint residents and scrappers say it's getting worse.
Some people are blaming this issue on the city's new trash pick up plan.
Flint Resident Hope Cordova is not shy about what she does. For years, she's made a living off others peoples trash. "Picking up scrap metal out of the fields," explained Cordova.
Cordova tells ABC12 reporters that she's been finding even more trash recently. She's discovering not just scrap metal and furniture, but the kind of trash that's not worth saving. "There's garbage cans all up and down back here. They just come and dump the whole garbage can down. They'll dump everything. They'll dump everything back there."
Foss Avenue dead ends into the field Cordova likes to rummage through. Darlene DeShazor, who lives nearby, says she has seen people dumping their trash in the field. "People have been dumping. You can go around and see where they've been dumping garbage," said DeShazor.
DeShazor says that, in recent weeks, there's been an increase in illegal dumping. She blames Flint's new every-other-week trash pick-up plan. "I guess they either have too much garbage and it starts stinking, so they take it somewhere else and dump it."
With an opposing view, DeShazor's neighbor Carolyn Liggins does not blame the new trash pick-up schedule. Liggins says that trash has always been an issue in their neighborhood. "They were dumping garbage over their anyway, so that doesn't have anything to do with that."
Whatever the reason, Cordova isn't making a stink about it. "We're finding more stuff. Every time we come out here we're finding more stuff ... These fields are loaded."
(Copyright ©2010 WJRT-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.) |
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Sun May 02, 2010 9:40 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Cheboygan Daily Tribune, July 27, 1993
The Offensive, Odorous Underbelly of Trash
by
Stephen P. Dresch
Newspapers statewide have been filled for several months with reports of mob activity and political chicanery in the Michigan trash business. Particularly riveting stories have come from Warren, where in 1991 the city's former trash hauler, Oakland Disposal, Inc., after its equipment was vandalized and its transfer station was firebombed, was replaced through a no-bid $16 million city contract with Warren Waste Transfer, a company established only a few weeks earlier, supposedly by Quirino D'Alessandro, a crony of Mayor Ronald Bonkowski.
In fact, D'Alessandro, who has been indicted on federal fraud charges as part of a continuing investigation of illegal gambling and money laundering and whose $1.5 million house has been seized by the Secret Service, was fronting for trash baron Anthony Soave, who, it turns out, owns Warren Waste Transfer. The confessed Oakland Disposal arsonist, small-time hood John Pree, now testifies that he and his accomplice, Carlo Bommarito, got the order to vandalize Oakland Disposal's equipment and firebomb its transfer station from Detroit mob boss Vito Giacalone. Pree, Bommarito and Bommarito's father, Francesco, a longtime Giacalone associate, have been charged with arson and conspiracy.*
Although Soave has had previous links to Detroit mob figures (including an early 1970s partnership with Frank Mudaro, described in 1963 U.S. Senate hearings as a section leader in the Detroit Mafia; earlier, Mudaro had been a business partner of William "Black Bill" Tocco, one of the five ruling dons of the Detroit Mafia), Soave's underlings dismiss Pree's sworn testimony as ludicrous. However, Soave clearly has profited from the demise of Oakland Disposal. In addition to his Warren contracts, Soave has acquired other trash-related businesses from Oakland Disposal's former owners, brothers John and Robert Runco, and City Management is currently trying to get permits to reopen Oakland Disposal's former landfill in Waterford Township.
But, we need not go to the Detroit metropolitan area to observe the questionable dealings of Anthony Soave. In late 1991 Soave's City Management Corp. acquired for $3.8 million a landfill jointly owned by Crawford and Otsego Counties, although another bidder had offered about 50 percent more (and a 50 percent larger environmental clean-up fund). The deal was worked out by the landfill authority's lawyer, James Cotant, who, interestingly, had been a high-school classmate of Soave's director of landfill operations, Paul Sgriccia. Not coincidentally, Soave simultaneously paid $800,000 for the local trash-hauling business of Robert McLachlan, then-chairman of the Crawford County Board of Commissioners responsible for negotiating the landfill sale on behalf of the counties; McLachlan and his son were also given long-term employment contracts by City Management.
Prior to its acquisition by Soave, the Crawford-Otsego landfill had accumulated about $1 million in fines levied by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for violation of environmental laws. Shortly after Soave's purchase, representatives of City Management, the DNR and the Attorney Generalmet in the Lansing office of Senator John Pridnia (R-Hubbard Lake) and, under the watchful eye of Pridnia aide Mark Knudsen, negotiated the waiver of all but $200,000 of these fines (with the understanding that this $200,000 would not be paid to the state but would instead be spent on recycling in Crawford and Otsego counties; much of the expenditure to date has been for capital equipment). To meet in a legislator's office and to include a legislative staff member in the negotiations was unprecedented, but a DNR officer's objections were overruled. Perhaps not surprisingly, Pridnia has been the beneficiary of the financial largess of Soave's political action committee, City PAC.
After heading Michigan's unsuccessful search for a site for a low-level radioactive waste dump to serve a compact of midwest states, in 1991 James Cleary returned to the DNR as deputy director, in charge of solid waste regulation. When Crawford County Commissioner Joe Callewaert objected to the behind-the-scenes circumstances under which Soave's City Management had acquired the Crawford-Otsego landfill, Cleary asked for Callewaert's documentation, received it, and promised "a complete and thorough investigation." Less than five months later Cleary had accepted the Pridnia-negotiated waiver of fines on the landfill, taken early retirement from the DNR and joined Soave as a City Management officer (a position for which Pridnia claims to have recommended him). Perhaps not surprisingly, nothing was heard of Cleary's promised investigation.
Supposedly, there was to be no conflict between Cleary's new position with City Management and his previous role as deputy director of Michigan's DNR because Cleary would be working for City Management's Florida subsidiary, Universal Waste and Transit. However, answering an early 1993 call to Universal Waste's Tampa headquarters, the receptionist initially didn't even know who Cleary was and ultimately advised the caller to contact Cleary at City Management's Detroit headquarters. About the same time, a Lansing lobbyist for the solid waste industry observed that Cleary was regularly in Michigan and was "invaluable to the industry because of his influence" over his former DNR colleagues.
Soave's political affairs are handled by the ex-mayor of Flint, James Sharp, hired by Soave on the advice of the former speaker of the state House of Representatives, Gary Owen (D-Ypsilanti), who recommended Sharp as "a minority that could work in local government in the Detroit area." Reflecting the northern expansion of City Management's interests, Soave recently retained the lobbying services of former state Senator Mitch Irwin (D-Sault Ste. Marie). After the Alpena County Commission rejected a reciprocal solid-waste agreement proposed Crawford County which would have been of obvious benefit to City Management, Irwin called individual Alpena commissioners to chastise them for not granting carte blanche approval of City Management's participation in Alpena County's legally-required 20-year solid waste plan.
Probing the malodorous underbelly of trash, criminal and political, one does, certainly, discover interesting bedfellows. |
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Sun May 02, 2010 10:40 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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The Waste Management Dividend Play
By Justin Rohrlich Feb 08, 2010 12:55 pm
The lucrative trash hauling business makes its primetime debut.
(
Unless you changed channels -- or were too full of guacamole and beer to stay awake -- you may have caught the first episode of the new CBS (CBS) reality show Undercover Boss.
In the season premiere, Larry O'Donnell, president and COO of Waste Management (WM), the largest garbage collection and disposal company in the United States, labored alongside everyday employees who had no idea who he was until the end of the program.
The private carting industry is highly lucrative, especially for Waste Management, with $8.8 billion in sales during the first nine months of 2009. The company’s strong cash flow (though it carries a debt load of $8.2 billion) allows it to pay a $1.16 per-share dividend, up from $0.75 in 2004, according to Morningstar analyst Bradley Meeks.
Meeks recently raised his fair value estimate for Waste Management shares to $34. Wall Street analysts expect the company to report earnings of $0.48 per share next week.
Waste Management’s dividend payments make the firm stand apart from other carting companies, like Republic Services (RSG), Waste Connections (WCN), and Casella Waste Systems (CWST).
Houston money manager Ryan Krueger is on the hunt for dividends this year. “You can pay yourself now or later -- and I’ll take now,” he said. “With the 15% tax rate on dividends set to expire this year, it’s a buy for me right now, as next year dividends will be taxed as regular income.”
The big public trash haulers now operate freely across the country and overseas. But there was one market not one of them wanted to touch in the past: New York City.
In 1956, New York City passed a law requiring private businesses to hire private carting companies to remove their garbage, freeing the city’s sanitation department from the task. Almost immediately, the Genovese, Lucchese, Gambino, Bonanno, and Colombo crime families seized upon the opportunity to create their own carting firms, carving up territory in the five boroughs of New York and running their areas without competition. According to the 2004 book Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century, carting became the mob’s “most lucrative enterprise since Prohibition”.
It was then that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani created the Trade Waste Commission. The commission’s mandate was to break the Mafia’s stranglehold on the industry, which then consisted of more than 600 separate companies collecting trash from 250,000 businesses in New York City alone and added an extra 40% to each of their trash-removal costs -- the highest in the country.
This earned the Five Families about $1.5 billion annually.
During the first year, the commission shut down nearly one-third of the Mafia-run companies, and allowed national concerns -- such as Waste Management -- to do business in the large New York City market for the first time.
This not only benefited Waste Management and its competitors, it also lowered the prices companies had to pay for trash removal, which had previously been roughly three times as high as those paid by businesses in Los Angeles and Chicago.
The New York Times reported that one office building in lower Manhattan saw its trash collection bill drop by $1 million a year.
Before the Mafia cartel was broken, the carting industry blamed the higher costs in New York City to “excessive labor and landfill dumping expenses."
For some reason, Waste Management and the other players in the sector never seemed to have this problem.
Copyright 2009 Minyanville Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
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Sun May 02, 2010 10:50 am |
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Derrick1965
F L I N T O I D
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| Flint is becoming a landfill. |
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Mon May 03, 2010 5:05 pm |
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1pissedoffguy
F L I N T O I D
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quote:
untanglingwebs schreef:
The Waste Management Dividend Play
By Justin Rohrlich Feb 08, 2010 12:55 pm
The lucrative trash hauling business makes its primetime debut.
(
Unless you changed channels -- or were too full of guacamole and beer to stay awake -- you may have caught the first episode of the new CBS (CBS) reality show Undercover Boss.
In the season premiere, Larry O'Donnell, president and COO of Waste Management (WM), the largest garbage collection and disposal company in the United States, labored alongside everyday employees who had no idea who he was until the end of the program.
The private carting industry is highly lucrative, especially for Waste Management, with $8.8 billion in sales during the first nine months of 2009. The company’s strong cash flow (though it carries a debt load of $8.2 billion) allows it to pay a $1.16 per-share dividend, up from $0.75 in 2004, according to Morningstar analyst Bradley Meeks.
Meeks recently raised his fair value estimate for Waste Management shares to $34. Wall Street analysts expect the company to report earnings of $0.48 per share next week.
Waste Management’s dividend payments make the firm stand apart from other carting companies, like Republic Services (RSG), Waste Connections (WCN), and Casella Waste Systems (CWST).
Houston money manager Ryan Krueger is on the hunt for dividends this year. “You can pay yourself now or later -- and I’ll take now,” he said. “With the 15% tax rate on dividends set to expire this year, it’s a buy for me right now, as next year dividends will be taxed as regular income.”
The big public trash haulers now operate freely across the country and overseas. But there was one market not one of them wanted to touch in the past: New York City.
In 1956, New York City passed a law requiring private businesses to hire private carting companies to remove their garbage, freeing the city’s sanitation department from the task. Almost immediately, the Genovese, Lucchese, Gambino, Bonanno, and Colombo crime families seized upon the opportunity to create their own carting firms, carving up territory in the five boroughs of New York and running their areas without competition. According to the 2004 book Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century, carting became the mob’s “most lucrative enterprise since Prohibition”.
It was then that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani created the Trade Waste Commission. The commission’s mandate was to break the Mafia’s stranglehold on the industry, which then consisted of more than 600 separate companies collecting trash from 250,000 businesses in New York City alone and added an extra 40% to each of their trash-removal costs -- the highest in the country.
This earned the Five Families about $1.5 billion annually.
During the first year, the commission shut down nearly one-third of the Mafia-run companies, and allowed national concerns -- such as Waste Management -- to do business in the large New York City market for the first time.
This not only benefited Waste Management and its competitors, it also lowered the prices companies had to pay for trash removal, which had previously been roughly three times as high as those paid by businesses in Los Angeles and Chicago.
The New York Times reported that one office building in lower Manhattan saw its trash collection bill drop by $1 million a year.
Before the Mafia cartel was broken, the carting industry blamed the higher costs in New York City to “excessive labor and landfill dumping expenses."
For some reason, Waste Management and the other players in the sector never seemed to have this problem.
Copyright 2009 Minyanville Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Like a Tony Soprano huh? |
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Mon May 03, 2010 9:12 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Sun Oct 23, 2016 10:14 am |
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BillPayer
F L I N T O I D
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| Wait, seriously? Flint had a time where they only picked up Tash every other week? It drive-by crazy they only pick up recycling every two weeks. How long did they last? |
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Sun Oct 23, 2016 9:50 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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| Yes under Walling and it was a very hot summer. Public outcry caused it to stop. And there was no recycling at that time. Showing my age, but in the past Flint residents had to sort their recycling and take it to large bins on Grand Traverse. |
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Mon Oct 24, 2016 3:59 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Bryant Nolden and other council used to hold neighborhood cleanups. The older garbage trucks were used and volunteers provided the majority of the labor. I remember Nolden whimpering in pain after he injured his back with some very large pieces of furniture.
There are some unscrupulous private trash haulers who are paid by homeowners. They have issues about paying to dump and were using Flint's abandoned lots to dump their trash. Stanley tried to deal with it in the renewal area that became University Park, but even barriers couldn't stop all of the dumping. Much dumping comes from outside Flint.
When Mayor Williamson tried using dumpsters, the dumpsters were filling up too fast and his opponents chastised him. Now, I saw a suggestion about using dumpsters to combat blight. Go figure.
The Land bank hires summer workers to clean their properties. When Nolden was third Ward council, the older homeowners on the east side of Saginaw down to North, from Berston to Carpenter Road, were burdened with huge amounts of dumping. Nolden watched the Land Bank and made sure the area was clean. His rapport with the youth and citizens have kept that area maintained. |
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Mon Oct 24, 2016 4:17 am |
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