Is Anybody Home? : Mayor’s budget had proposed elimination of city trash cans

As the City of Los Angeles struggles to achieve a sensible 1994 budget amid the worst economic downturn around here since the Great Depression, all of us will have to try hard to maintain two of Mother Nature’s more important senses: the common one and the humor one.

A particularly well developed sense of humor will be helpful as officials confront the hard choices that inevitably attend cutting a budget cut substantially years before. And common sense always will comes in handy when trying to settle on reasonable government priorities.

Too bad neither sense was on display Thursday as a Los Angeles City Council committee began reviewing Mayor Tom Bradley’s proposed budget. Among its felicities was an unavoidable continuation of a three-year-old budget freeze and a further reduction in the staff of the Bureau of Street Maintenance by 50 workers.

Buried in the detail was an astonishing proposal to remove all of the city’s street corner trash cans. Yes, you read that sentence right. It was in the mayor’s budget: Remove all the trash cans, all 3,500 of them. Dump ‘em.

That revelation prompted committee Chairman Zev Yaraslavsky--a knowing, veteran city councilman--to hit the ceiling. Others in the room had a similar reaction. “Where were you smoking when you proposed this?” boomed Yaroslavsky.

Back to the drawing board went that proposal; and out of the room, tail tucked between, went bureau officials.

Yaroslavsky was right, of course, and the mayor’s office was wrong. In this era of hard choices and scarce dollars, government has to do all it can to maintain its credibility. Absurd proposals won’t help. They’ll only leave people laughing--not with government, but at it.