Jonathan Earl Peck as Othello. Those are real tears -- not easy to call forth when you're only pretending to realize you've just strangled your wife to death for absolutely no reason.
To everyone from weirdo Shakespeare enthusiasts, to the merely Bard-curious, to those who’ve given up every last shred of hope that they’d ever appreciate or even understand the dead Briton’s work: Check out my piece in the A&E Stage section of this week’s (July 3) CityLife. It’s all about the 2008 Utah Shakespearean Festival, where I’ve spent the last four days breathing cleaner air, exulting in temperatures 15 degrees cooler than Vegas and gawking at four high-energy, superior productions — two by Shakespeare (Othello, The Taming of the Shrew) and two not (Moliere’s The School for Wives, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac).
To the enthusiasts: If you haven’t made the jaunt to Cedar City, Utah (a two-hour drive, no matter what Mapquest says) for any of the festival’s last 46 seasons, now’s a good time. And don’t worry about witnessing your boy’s genius strangled by a troupe of pretentious, unfeeling jackasses … these USF people are nationally successful pros to the core, none caring to produce garbage any more than you care to see it.
To the Bard-curious: This may be the best chance you’ll get in a long while for a proper introduction — one where an uber-talented, vision-rich stage company takes Shakespeare’s famously “difficult” material and renders it, as he’d have liked it, so fleshy and comprehensible you’ll wonder where the ugly rumors got started.
To the hopeless: Give it one more shot. If the naked, undiluted anguish of USF’s Othello doesn’t leave you shaken and stirred for at least a little while, then yeah, give up.
Republic Services has been one the valley’s most prolific political donors, and for years, the company has essentially gotten everything it wanted. But now, faced with losing what amounts to a little more than one year’s profits, the trash hauler has decided to play hardball with the county.
According to a story in today’s Las Vegas Sun, Republic Area President Bob Coyle threatened via letter to unilaterally raise garbage rates 6.47 percent (about $2.27 on a quarterly bill) if the county refuses to add a 2.2 percent “environmental surcharge” to bills to pay for the cost of fixing Sunrise landfill.
That’s balls, people. Big ones. If anybody ever asks you someday if you’ve seen big balls, you can now answer, “why yes, yes I have.”
For those who don’t know, Sunrise landfill had some problems back in the late 1990s. The company that eventually became Republic promised to fix those problems, up to a cost of up to $36 million, in exchange for adding 15 long years to its existing monopoly franchise agreement with Clark County. The county agreed, and everybody was happy.
Except for now, years later, the company has sunk about $30 million into the project, and it looks like it will need another $36 million before it’s all said and done. So Republic has been saying the county should pass those costs on to customers, which would add about 81 cents to a quarterly garbage bill. (Under the late-1990s deal, it was agreed the company could ask the county for more money if costs exceeded the original $36 million, but the county didn’t have to agree to pay, which means the company was on the hook. And a district attorney’s legal opinion has since confirmed that.)
So far, it seems only Clark County Commissioner Chip Maxfield has been willing to slap customers with the surcharge. And that means the company apparently had to go to Plan B: Raising rates anyway. According to Coyle’s letter, Republic has the authority under two older agreements — signed in 1993 — to unilaterally raise “tipping fees” for disposing of trash in landfills.
“If the county refuses to negotiate in good faith with Republic, Republic will be forced to invoke the provision allowing it to unilaterally increase tipping fees to recoup cleanup costs,” Coyle wrote.
So this is what happens when the legal bribery system we call “campaign finance” fails, huh? It’s hardly ever happened in Las Vegas history, so this is truly an historic day!
What’s not historic, however, is the tactic. See, Republic has charged illegal fees before. And instead of criminally charging the company (as we humbly suggested), the county simply built the previously illegal fees into the law, and Republic nicely agreed to give back the fraudulently obtained money. True humanitarians, they are.
And it’s not just illegal fees. Republic has pushed to get out of the twice-weekly trash pickup that it used, in part, to sell the county on why it deserved a franchise extension. The company, and a county task force, has proposed boosting recycling pickups and reducing trash pickups, but it turns out customers don’t like fermenting waste baking in their garages in summer heat. (The county, nevertheless, is still doing a “pilot project” studying the plan.)
Oh, and while the company is complaining about the cost of the Sunrise landfill cleanup, we learn that it took in $274 million in revenue in 2007, of which $34 million is pure profit, according to the Sun. Assuming the company makes good on its original promise to pay the full $36 million costs of cleaning up Sunrise landfill (and the company has a history of not keeping promises), that would leave $30 million in costs not covered by the original agreement, or less than a single year’s profits. Given that the county helpfully extended the company’s exclusive franchise by 15 years, and has given it most everything it wanted before and since, a single year’s profit seems like a small price for the company to pay, especially since it agreed to clean up the landfill with no guarantee that the county or customers would pay for unanticipated costs.
Oh, did we mention Republic has the wherewithal to buy another company in a deal valued at $6 billion?
Up until now, we’ve advocated consistently that Republic should be offered a choice: Either clean up the Sunrise landfill at its own expense, or, be allowed to pass the cost along to ratepayers but in exchange be forced to give up the extra 15 years on its franchise agreement. Fair is fair, right? If the company isn’t going to keep up its end of the deal, then the county should be free to cancel the extension.
But here’s the thing: By consistently acting in bad faith, by breaking the law and by failing to live up to an agreement it signed, and now by threatening customers with increased fees unless the county gives in, Republic has crossed a final line. The county should be researching — right now, as you read this — a way to terminate Republic’s franchise agreement as quickly as possible, and find a better company to do the job in Las Vegas. Taxpayers may end up eating the rest of the costs to clean up the Sunrise landfill, but in the end, we’ll be rid of a company that’s consistently scheming against its own customers, often with the county sitting idly by.
With Coyle’s letter to the county, Republic has proven it cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and, in fact, can be counted upon to do the wrong thing. Government shouldn’t reward that kind of behavior. It should reject it.
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