What Other Businesses Can Los Angeles Destroy? What About Trash Haulers?

Los Angeles City Council has
voted to seize the local private business/large apartment trash
hauling industry, take control of it, and sell off exclusive
contracts to those it deems appropriate. The word “seize” is not
used, of course, but instead it’s all being sold as a recycling and
landfill-use reduction plan. It takes the Los Angeles
Times nine paragraphs to get past the environmental
back-patting to explain
what’s actually going on:

Currently, landlords for businesses and apartments choose
between competing businesses to haul their trash. Under the new
“exclusive franchise” system, Los Angeles will be divided up into
11 zones. Haulers will bid for city contracts giving them the
exclusive right to collect garbage in each zone.

The new system is hitched to environmental standards: To be
eligible to win each zone, haulers would have to provide separate
bins for recycling and use “clean fuel” vehicles, among
other ecologically friendly requirements.

The plan is backed by environmentalists and labor groups, who
say the system is the best way to help Los Angeles meet its goal of
diverting 90% of its trash from landfills. Activists say the system
will also mean fewer trucks crisscrossing city streets
and safer conditions for workers in a dangerous industry.

The city is turning a private competitive service into a
monopoly. The Times does note that the proposal puts
unions and environmentalists against business and private
property:

Business groups say the new system will put small
haulers out of business and ultimately drive up rates.

“The environmental benefits are subterfuge for an effort to
organize an industry that the unions couldn’t organize
themselves,” Central City Assn. of Los Angeles president and CEO
Carol Schatz told The Times last week.

Indeed, labor unions were chanting “Si se puede”
(“Yes, it can be done”) outside the council meeting after the vote
passed. Those union folks really, truly care a lot about the
environment, eh?

Only one council member voted against the new regulation,
Bernard C. Parks. He was also the only council member to vote
against the city’s pointless plastic bag ban. Reason
TV and Kennedy interviewed him in 2012. He was concerned this
new trash plan would harm small businesses. A head of a local
commerce association predicts the new monopolies could drive more
than 100 small haulers out of business and suggested the city could
require environmental and recycling policies among private haulers
without resorting to exclusive contracts.

Speaking of small businesses being harmed in Los Angeles, the
city is still
shutting down medical marijuana dispensaries that don’t fall
under the city’s protection racket put in place by a local ballot
initiative. The Los Angeles Daily News notes the city is
also
extracting fines from and charging landlords who rent to
unauthorized pot dispensaries, even though the city is still
causing confusion by sending out tax certificates to applicants
that don’t qualify to do business in the city. These certificates
are then being shown to landlords as evidence that the dispensary
is legal, even if it’s not.

(Hat tip to Cato’s Walter Olson)