With extraordinary arrogance and so little regard for taxpayers who are already suffering the sins of bureaucratic incompetence — see the school district’s obscene cost overruns for building projects — St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said the city will appeal the ruling that has suspended the agreement with trash haulers. Worse, if the city loses the appeal, Carter said he will raise property taxes later to make up the difference if the city has to pay the haulers.

Ramsey County District Judge Leonardo Castro ordered the city’s ordinance establishing organized trash collection suspended starting June 30. In ordinary language, the judge ruled that the deal the city made with the haulers was no good. In legal language, it was void ab initio, void from the beginning. The city had no right to establish the contract because ignoring the petition to put it to a vote was a violation of the city’s charter. We get to have a say in such things, and our voice was ignored.

The key question now is whether the city at least had a clause in the contract with the haulers allowing the city to back out of the agreement without damages if the contract was found to be invalid. The city either knew or should have known that the contract would be subject to challenge. I left a message with city attorney Lyndsey Olson to ask her that question.

In other words, going back to plain language, the city should have built into the so-called agreement a “get out of jail free” card. The fear is that it did not. This incompetence is not entirely the fault of the Carter administration and his 16 Cabinet members. The city intended to take trash-hauling agreements out of the hands of the citizens beginning in 2017.

If the city loses the appeal and concedes that it cannot hit us up to pay for its mistake, there is nothing to stop the haulers from filing their own lawsuits. If a hauler with, say, 700 homes under the flawed agreement suddenly ends up with 500 homes, its recourse will be to sue the city for damages and thus the merry-go-round of endless and wasteful spending will continue to plague us.

It should never have come to this. Yes, government-organized trash collection appealed to some who actually fell for the nonsense that fewer trucks in the alley would result in a charitable kindness to the Earth. And there might have been others who felt that arranging their own contract was too burdensome and still others who just aren’t paying attention and don’t really have an oar in the water.

But most of us cared. It didn’t take long to come up with more than 6,000 names on a petition. Privately arranged agreements with haulers was the way of life and we enjoyed those arrangements. The city bollixed the whole thing up. Residents of fourplexes, for example, worked out their own agreement with a hauler to share one bin and one hauler. Under the city’s botched plan, each unit of the fourplex has to have a bin, meaning those people are paying more for the service, not less as promised, not to mention that trucks have to linger longer in the alley, thus invalidating any claim that an organized system would somehow reduce the cliché of a carbon footprint.

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Soucheray: On the stoop of Sacred Heart Church, they do what they can do We are poorly led under one-party rule. There is no check and balance, save, gratefully, for a judge. And it isn’t really a party that is running the city. It is an ideology; with all of them marching in lockstep to the tune of they know what’s best for us. Thus a completely incompetent agreement with haulers that should never have existed in the first place.

What’s next? Oh, yes, the city wants to put other small businesses out of work and plow your alley.

People, if you don’t wake up…

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.