“Always carry a trash basket in your car. It doesn’t take up much room, and if it gets full you can always throw it out the window.”

— Steve Martin

Yes, it’s all fun and games until someone dumps a mattress at the corner of Home and Sweet Home. Which happens in Richmond more often than you might think.

Richmond Mayor Tom Butt thinks about it a lot. In a recent post on his popular E-Forum, he vented, “People treat Richmond like a public dump, and just keeping up with the daily onslaught of trash, graffiti and weeds is a Herculean task that consumes the time of dozens of city employees on a daily basis. If these people weren’t constantly cleaning up after slobs, we would have millions of dollars to staff libraries, put cops on the beat and pave streets.”

Butt doesn’t know how much the graffiti/weed/trash abatement costs Richmond each year. “It’s got to be in the millions,” he said. But he can quantify the refuse down to the last mattress tag.

He said more than 3.3 million pounds of garbage was illegally dumped at 15,256 locations in Richmond in 2016. That included 3,000 not-so-gently used mattresses and 1,480 tires.

It didn’t take long, during a recent tour of Richmond, to find a mattress, a tire and a handful of sofas sitting on curbs along residential streets. What’s a mayor to do?

“By law, everybody in Richmond has to pay for garbage service,” Butt said. “If they don’t, we put a lien on the property. It goes to the landlord, not the renter. We have a bulky item pick-up once or twice a year, so if you have a couch or something, you can arrange to have someone pick it up.”

The city also holds annual neighborhood clean-ups. “We try to spread that information any way we can through neighborhood councils,” Butt said. “It’s a challenge.”

Richmond is third only to Concord and Antioch in terms of population in Contra Costa County. We checked with Justin Ezell, Concord’s public works director, to see if his city is similarly challenged.

Not by a long shot. According to Ezell, during the fiscal year 2015-16, Concord had to haul away 39,042 pounds of illegally dumped trash from 224 locations. Included in that haulaway, which cost $63,000, were 82 mattresses and 24 car tires.

You could argue that this is an apple core to orange rind comparison, and you might have a point, but even if you include Concord’s total for homeless encampment clean-ups, the 121,100 pounds of trash removed from city streets doesn’t amount to 4 percent of Richmond’s annual burden.

“Richmond as a whole is a very low-income city,” Butt said, noting that the city ranks near the bottom in the Bay Area in median household income. “I think it goes on with poverty. You see it in parts of the city that are more economically challenged. People aren’t as protective of their neighborhoods. They have more renters than ownership.”

Compounding the problem are the flim-flam hauling companies that offer to remove trash for homeowners or renters for a low discount price. Butt said they can be found at Home Depot, on craigslist and driving around neighborhoods looking for suckers, er, customers.

“They pick up all your trash,” Butt said. “But the chances of that trash winding up in the landfill are not great.”

Instead, many of these operators drive to another part of the city and dump the trash illegally. If nothing else, you have to admire their business model. It’s conceivable they could get paid multiple times for moving the same pile of garbage.

Who knew it paid to be a slob?