And this is news, why?
Dog owners in Everett don’t need to bring dog-waste bags when they visit the local park. Taxpayers are providing the bags for them.
As Everett officials have been cutting millions from the budget, the city spent $8,430 last year on plastic bags for pet waste. The Herald of Everett reports the city bought 120 cases of pet waste bags, which volunteers use to stock 36 stations at city parks and trails.
Um, anybody at the AP or the Seattle Times ever visit a public park? Seattle parks provide poop bag dispensers, as do King County parks. In fact, you’ll find them at parks, trails and popular dog-walking routes in municipalities of all sizes throughout the nation. So judging from the lede, I can only assume that the editors at the Times and the AP found this particular dropping of non-news newsworthy, I suppose as an illustration of wasteful government spending… which, of course, is a complete and utter load of crap.
Poop bag dispensers are a basic public service that helps keep our sidewalks and parks clean. Honestly, would you rather spend a few cents a piece of taxpayer money to encourage and enable your fellow citizens to fulfill their civic duty, or would you rather, you know, step in it? I know there are some who insist that government should be limited to arresting criminals, building roads and deporting brown people, but that’s a libertarian dystopia that would quickly have all of us routinely scraping dog shit from the soles of our shoes.
So thanks AP/Seattle Times for pointing out the little things government does to improve our quality of life.
UPDATE:
Alternative Theory: perhaps the Times objects to unfair competition from publicly funded poop bags, because picking up shit is the most natural and beneficial use of the plastic bags their paper comes wrapped in? Kinda like the same way they would oppose the free distribution of rubber bands?
UPDATE, UPDATE:
Alternative Theory #2: Frank Blethen hates dogs.
Perhaps instead the Seattle Times newsroom could fire HALF of its staff and replace them with the one, the only, the Great Washingtonian Heather “Newsbrooke” Brooke and have their entire editorial writer staff replaced with the greatest Washington State Secretary of Defense Mary Lane “Marummy” Strow.
We’d get better news and the Blethens would earn their new Washington Coalition for Open Government award big time! Every stinkin’ year!! And advertising revenue would skyrocket to the point they could afford David Goldstein as a columnist!!!
These reminds me of the ridiculous arguments about the National Endowment for the Arts, or any government function that represents less then 0.0001% of our budget (nationally or state). Grow up people. This is a GREAT super cheap good thing to do. If you want to argue about budgets, don’t bitch about plastic bags or the Fed giving out $5,000 grants to a non-profit, while AT THE SAME TIME turning your back on billions missing and unaccounted for in Iraq. Have SOME freaken common sense and rational thought before writing this junk. Lets worry about the BIG stuff, and work our way DOWN the list from the stuff that matters. Once all of our major problems are solved, we can argue for dog shit bags and thousand dollar grants to local art organizations. It’s as if…almost…it’s just distractions so we don’t notice the real issues. Huh?
I’m going with Alternative Theory #2:
http://tinyurl.com/2v7dyl7
I’m going with Alternative Theory #2:
http://tinyurl.com/2v7dyl7
Add the city of Gig Harbor to the list of nanny state coddlers that provide dog waste baggies. Prior to having dog waste baggies available we had dog waste all over down town. So gross.
How about dog owners’ be responsible and thus, bring their own poop bags? This isn’t a public service at all, but yet another way the liberal government is sending a message that people aren’t or don’t have to take responsibility for their own actions. Want to have kids? Let someone else feed them, clothe them, provide day care for them. Want a dog? Provide poop bags. Get real.
Rae,
I rarely leave home without a poop bag in my back pocket, but on those rare occasions that I forget, or that my dog unexpectedly poops twice, it’s good to have the dispensers available.
But more important, municipalities provide the bags because it has shown that making them visibly available makes people much more compliant with laws requiring that they pick up after their dogs.
Complain about human nature all you want, but the result of not providing these bags is that we will all step in more shit. Perhaps you’re comfortable with ideology trumping reality, but I’m not.
@6 Conservatives Libertarians often live in a fantasy world of SHOULD rather the the real world.
We can all agree that dog owners SHOULD be responsible and bring their own bags.
Yet in the REAL world, many don’t.
Would you rather live in a fantasy world where people always pick up after their dogs or don’t get dogs in the first place, or pay for publicly provided poop bags so you are less like to step in poop and spread filth.
Here’s a parallel.
We can all agree that everyone should be SHOULD be responsible and not rob banks.
Yet in the REAL world, some people rob banks.
Would you rather live in a fantasy world where people don’t rob banks or pay for police to stop the bank robbers?
@6 Also typical republican. He were able to transfer paying for dog poop bags to his hatred for helping lower class people.
Republicans have no problem giving tax breaks to million and billionaires and wasting trillions on needless invasions and war, but if a dime of their money is spent helping a lower class family of any color out of poverty, they think that’s a travesty of what this country was founded on.
Bunch of souless Social Darwinists.
@7 and 8: I would like people to be as responsible as I am. I know my dog might poop more than once….and I plan accordingly. Sheesh, if your dog has EVER pooped more than once, I’d think you’d be smart enough to plan ahead also. And sometimes, it’s a good thing, and one of those teachable moments, to help out a fellow dog owner who didn’t plan ahead by handing them a bag. What is so hard about leash, dog, bags?
@ 9: so the lower class can afford food, shelter, and vet care for a dog, but not poop bags? Give me a break. And I am not a Republican…or a man.
@10. You prove my argument. You live in the world of SHOULD, not the world of reality.
No, I live in a world of personal responsibility, and I don’t see that improving if we provide for every little thing the irresponsible “forget.”
@6
I live in Gig Harbor. We’re packed to the gills with REPUBLICANS and various other conservatives here. On hot days the stench from dog crap would make me gag when walking on sidewalks down town.
Our city government isn’t exactly liberal and our mayor is a Republican who’s a retired real estate developer. Since we started having baggies and disposal sites for dog waste you can walk down town in the summer without gaging.
I really doubt this issue has anything to do with being liberal or conservative.
@12. Sorry about that, Rae is kind of like Pat, It could go both ways.
Now after all that fire and brimstone, if it came down to funding doggie poop bags or funding more public school teachers, I’d hope they had the wisdom to choose the teachers as more important.
Or hit it with our bicycles. Last summer some bright bulb had their dog do its, rather large, business on the road on one of Gig Harbors steep hills. I hit the pile going about 30MPH. So gross.
@14 I agree: this isn’t about being liberal or conservative….and it shouldn’t be cloaked as helping the low income folks either. I know that some lower income folks are very responsible and I know some wealthy people who are not.
Maybe I just need to seriously lower my expectations…
When my office was at 3rd and Wall in Belltown a few years back there was just too damned much dogshit left on the sidewalks by condo owners walking their hounds. As a blight on the old neighborhood, the condo owners competed with the usual Belltown riff-raff. In many ways, they were no better than those unfortunates whom they so obviously despised.
My dog uses the ST to poop and pee upon.
No need for publicly funded poop bags for me.
I just pick a copy of the ST from nearly any trash can and let the dog improve any story 100 fold.
She makes every section of the ST the business section.
LOL… Good one.
Government spending on poop bags is just more corporate welfare.
I take a squishy stand against these magnates of baggery.
Why cant dog owners(who apparntly can afford to own a dog) purchase their own shit-bags instead of making everyone else pay for them?
This has to one of the stupidest fucking govt programs I have ever heard of. Its shit like this that pisses people off and keeps them from voting for higher taxes.
mommy govt at its finest…..
@18
owning a dog while living in a condo in the concrete jungle of belltown is downright animal cruelty. What sick fuck does that kind of shit – its almost as bad as raising a child in downtown.
@22
Good question!
Is it as stupid as hiring poop police to make sure people clean up after their dogs? Banning dogs from public places? We had a problem with dog poop in public places in Gig Harbor. Now we have baggies and the problem is, largely, taken care of.
You didn’t propose a workable solution to the problem.
@23
Yep!
Some dogs do OK in condos, but even then the neighbors have to be subjected to yappy little mutts. I’m quite allergic to most dogs (it seems to vary dog to dog) and wouldn’t want to have to share an elevator with a dog on a regular basis.
You know, I’d pay more than a few cents to help keep dog crap picked up in the parks.
I think that the Times sees dogpiles as free advertising and that’s why they don’t want them picked up.
@5 “yappy little mutts”
I couldn’t tell how many times I saw beautiful women in all their finery (I struggle to recall seeing any pooper-scooper fashion accessories, although I recall there being plenty of dogshit on the sidewalks) walking huge dogs in Belltown in the middle of a weekday. The lack of control they had over these big dogs was often a problem. I saw one very big hound drag a woman for half a block as it tried to chase down a smaller dog. They struck me as being kept women, bored trophy wives with nothing else to do. But who knows, maybe they were all astrophysicists on vacation or working nights.
Let’s try to be realistic here. it’s simple GOP math — if we cut $8430 from the budget then we can offset the “millions” being cut from the budget.
sorry–let’s raise taxes and spend gub’mint money on paying for services that will stimulate the local economy so that revenues will rise.
But that’s just silly, isn’t it? After all, we all know that firing thousands of previously wage-earning and service-consuming workers is the way to to really fire up a local economy.