Tuesday, August 05, 2008

The Garbage Police

One of the articles on my "to blog" list from last week's vacation reading was a story from Friday's San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has proposed that the city's garbage collectors inspect citizens' garbage to be certain that trash, recycling, and compost (food) items are properly sorted.

Failure to "correctly" sort one's garbage could lead to fines as high as $1000.

Newsom has aspirations to be California's governor, so if this new nanny state idea holds up in San Francisco, all Californians could eventually be looking at having their personal lives, via their garbage, on display to any inspector. The liberal state legislature, which just passed a statewide trans fat ban in restaurants, would probably love this idea.

Doesn't that kind of governmental inspection require a warrant, or are the contents of garbage cans "free game" once they're handed over to government-hired collectors?

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air has thoughts along similar lines.

1 Comments:

Blogger Missy said...

Perhaps Mayor Newsom should give hands-on demonstrations to each sanitation crew so they know exactly what it is he wants them to do.

And wouldn't this be a case of the garbage collector's word vs. the homeowner's? Do they call local police to mediate?

Missy http://missyisms.typepad.com

10:26 AM  

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