Can the complaints

So, you're just living your life, minding your own business, and one day the city stops picking up your garbage:

Alan Davis, a resident of Jeffersonville's Colonial Park, learned of a new city policy the hard way.

He put his garbage out to the curb during the first week of January and it wasn't picked up. The next trash day rolled around and so he tried it again — still the same result.

Davis' garbage, as it turned out, was not left sitting there on accident. He — like many others in his neighborhood and other areas of city — was simply unaware of a city ordinance that went into effect at the beginning of the year requiring residents to have a specific type of garbage can.

Well, why didn't they tell you? What is this, double-secret provisions of the city code?

The city has been telling people that the cans were required for the last year or so with a message posted on sewer bills and through the local media, including this newspaper.

But not everyone has gotten the message.

“There really are a lot of people who don't even know” that the cans are required, Davis said.

He's not an everyday reader of any newspaper and he rents his place, so the sewer bill goes to his landlord.

Well, that hardly seems adequate, just putting it in the newspaper and the sewer bill:

Davis believes fliers should have been distributed to notify people about the change. He said he's hopeful that his landlord will pay for the can.

Maybe next time, they ought to send people out to knock on each and every door and personally tell everybody about new ordinances. We should probably give some "credit where it's due" praise for Fort Wayne, which seemed to handle a similar switchover much better a few years ago. I don't know all they did, but I remember a separate stuffer in my City Utilities bill, and we didn't seem to have piles of garbage outside the homes of hordes of clueless residents. And (I think) we don't have to use the new cans; it's a change from the firm with the garbage contract, not a change in city code.