Low-income communities thus tend to have lower revenue potential than other jurisdictions, and to have noticeably higher tax rates. As a result, they are less able to raise money for services than other more affluent communities. Moreover, this combination of lower services and higher tax rates further diminishes the value of the property in the area and discourages large ratables from moving in, thus further reinforcing the community's plight and inhibiting services to its

residents.

Those involved in supplying services, however, worry about an interpretation of "fiscal neutrality” that would equalize service expenditures on some kind of per capita basis. Would equalizing expenditures also equalize what the service is designed to achieve? Judging from the literature and from our extensive experience analyzing and help ing to supply municipal services, we would have to answer in the negative.

Spending more money does not necessarily mean we get better

results.

Consider also sanitation: two garbage pick-ups a week keep most suburbs clean, while not even six pick-ups a week seem to do the job in Harlem.

Simply equalizing some service expenditures, among jurisdictions or among areas within one jurisdiction, may therefore achieve the opposite of what is intended, diverting resources from where they can have their greatest effects, and widening disparities in actual service levels.

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Our earlier discussion has outlined the importance of local public services to the poor, and the lack of facts and firm evidence about how these services are actually distributed now. We have also described the presures for distributive justice-politically, economically, and through the courts-and the tendency of the courts to focus on "fiscal neutrality" or equalization of expenditures as the principal standard for an ideal. And we have noted the potentially regressive impact of this standard, particularly for services where cities now try to match expenditures with needs.

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We must also explore another difficult issue: we should ask what services the poor "ought" to be receiving. What "ought" to be, of course, implies a normative value judgment, based not only on perceptions of desirable economic objectives but also on notions of what is equitable or "fair."

Practically speaking, equity depends on context. City governments usually have the power to reallocate services within their cities, and their decisions may be accepted as equitable of the decision rules are appropriate and the procedures followed seem proper. Inter-city differences are not so easily resolved. Traditions of home rule and the competition for affluent residents complicate service reallocation, with respect to both management and acceptance by the affected citizens.

Where states or the federal government may impose reallocation in the name of equity, deep-seated feelings and even constitutional issues may arise.

In addition, unlike effectiveness, for which reasonably objective indices can be found, equity is inherently a subjective notion, for what is "fair" clearly depends on one's cultural biases and point of view. Equity is often construed to mean equality, and arguments are often advanced to the effect that services should be distributed equallye.g., by population, area, or political identity. But rigorously equal distribution may not be at all "fair." Moreover, even if one were to accept equality as a proxy for equity, the question would remain: equality of what?

In deploying police, for example, ought one allocate equal numbers of police per capita or per area to each part of a city, independent of the likely need for police in each area? Ought one, rather, strive to make the crime rates or victimization rates equal? Or ought one deploy police to equalize the likelihood of effective apprehension for reported incidents? The consequences of these different notions of equality (which are only a sample of the possible notions) lead to quite different distributions of police services.

Once a method of measuring service performance and impact is established, the next step is to examine actual public service delivery patterns for selected services in several cities. It is imperative to know what is really happening: policies and decisions are much better based on fact than on surmise. We also need to ensure that solutions are not designed for the wrong problems, and that strategies are not selected that make the real problems worse, rather than better. And we need to compare actual service distributions with our various ideal standards, to see how close they are now and where major gaps yet remain.

More recently, working on a very modest scale with the New York City Department of Sanitation, we have begun examining the collection and disposal problems different urban neighborhoods face. Decaying slums and prosperous neighborhoods, areas with single-family homes and with large apartments, clearly require different kinds and levels of solid waste collection activity, and may even require quite different institutional and technological approaches. Yet these differences are not reflected in national solid waste policies. We are thus considering New York City as a "laboratory," which in its diversity contains most of the solid waste problem types found in American cities and suburbs. We hope that examining these specific problems and the methods that seem most appropriate for resolving them will highlight national needs, in both research and ecological policy. We hope that it may also help show how local service quality, and the determinants of that quality, vary with neighborhood characteristics, including socio-economic status.

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Sanitation service has two basic objectives: to keep the living environment cleaned of solid waste materials, and to dispose of the waste collected without polluting the environment in other ways. As sani

tation service is provided now, these collection and disposal functions are essentially separable, in that how one collects the garbage does not greatly influence how one can dispose of it, and vice versa. Disposal is inherently a technological problem, usually addressed in much the same way for all parts of a city, and rarely affects citizens directly unless the practices used are incompetent or illegal (such as uncovered dumping or open burning). We will thus not be concerned with disposal in this work, and will focus entirely upon collection—a service that does vary notably from area to area and does affect directly nearly everyone's life.

The basic measure of effectiveness for collection is obvious: how clean the streets are. Both our staff and a group at the Urban Institute have developed systems for objectively determining "cleanliness,” as we have noted in detail earlier. Both these systems have been tested, in New York and the District of Columbia, respectively, and seem to work well. Application to other cities should be relatively straightforward, if needed. We plan to begin with the data that have already been collected in New York and Washington, and may select a smaller city for a third test if additional data should appear useful for comparison.

Measures of performance are similarly apparent: missed collections of residual trash versus numbers of trucks and crews; frequency of collection; volumes and tons of trash collected per unit of time. Most of these can be obtained, at least in first approximation, from managerial and operating records. Where these may be suspect, as they are reputed to be in many cities, they can be checked with spot measurements and observations.

Below this level of consideration, a number of complicating factors emerge that must be taken into account. One serious question in many cities is: who is responsible for the unclean conditions that we observe? Few larger cities have a single trash collection service. Even New York City, which has a Department of Sanitation with over 10.000 men and a combined capital and expense budget exceeding $300 million per year, also has 4000 private carting firms, which serve commercial and industrial buildings. Los Angeles has vast numbers of private firms, which often compete for customers on the same block, and so do many other cities. Sanitation in many jurisdictions is thus a mixed assortment of public and regulated private services, often with limited accountability and no great willingness to be responsive to citizens' needs. In the cities where we do examine sanitation, we will thus have to devise methods for untangling this responsibility and assigning credits or debits where they are due.

In relating services to expenditures, and in looking at services, per se, we will also try to account for a host of secondary services that influence cleanliness. These include leaf pickup, bulk pickup, assistance with cleanup directly on personal property, and "can service"in which the collection agent takes garbage cans from people's porches. garages, sheds, etc., as well as from the alley or curb line. This last service can be important in areas where animals, children, or scavengers tend to overturn garbage cans placed on the street and strew the trash beyond the ability of the collector to pick it up in the time he has for each stop. It is also an expensive extra, so that the costs must

be weighed against whatever increased effectiveness can be discerned. Perhaps even more important, and more difficult to treat, are the neighborhood "externalities" in dynamic equilibrium with the service provided. We know, for example, that a great deal of effort can be channeled into a given neighborhood (e.g., the South Bronx in New York City) without achieving terribly apparent results. Because of cultural disorganization, "airmail" garbage flies into the street, yards, and alleys faster than it can be picked up, kids expropriate trash cans as playthings, and winos scatter their Spanada bottles on the streets. Conceivably, some who live in the neighborhood, or visitors passing through, might complain of gross neglect by the sanitation department; some of their complaints might be warranted, and some might not. Evaluating sanitation service in such areas (nearly all of which are poverty areas) will require detailed research and analysis of the interacting forces at work.

Lastly, local legal constraints and traditions also must be examined. In New York City, for example, the Sanitation Department must obtain formal permission to clear trash from private property, and union rules limit the extent to which broom men will sweep sidewalks as well as streets. Other cities' sanitation services have similar rules that bound the effectiveness they can achieve. Our analysis may properly point out the gains the city could make by relaxing the rules, but it will also have to try to evaluate the game as it is played.

4. Complaint in Burner v. Washington, Civil Action No. 242-71 (D.C.D.C.):

COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY JUDGMENT AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF

(1) This is an action for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief to compel defendants to fulfill their statutory, regulatory, administrative, common law and Constitutional obligations to plaintiffs to provide a suitable environment for living in that part of the District of Columbia located east of the Anacostia River and, more specifically, to regulate land uses, administer housing programs, and provide essential municipal services, including public education, refuse collection, police and fire protection, public recreation facilities, public transportation and public sdewalks, on an adequate, equitable and lawful basis which does not discriminate against residents of the area east of the Anacostia River.

(53) Responsibility for the collection of trash, garbage and other refuse is shared within the District of Columbia Government by the Commissioner, defendant Washington, and the defendant members of the Council, who review and may revise budget requests submitted by the Commissioner for funds to provide refuse collection services and who are authorized to adopt regulations relating to the provision of such services. Pursuant to Organization Order No. 147, 651154 (August 19, 1965), the Commissioner has delegated to the Dis

trict of Columbia Department of Sanitary Engineering his duty "to plan, provide, operate and maintain sanitary services, systems and facilities which will maintain, improve and promote the well-being of the community and its people."

(54) The defendant Commissioner, through the Department of Sanitary Engineering, has adopted a system of trash and garbage collection pursuant to which responsibility for collection from the City's dwelling units has been delegated and divided among three separate entities, depending on the nature of the dwelling unit served, as follows. First, the Department of Sanitary Engineering uses its own personnel, equipment and funds to collect trash and garbage from all single-family homes and residences having three or fewer living units and from a small portion of the City's public housing units. Second, the National Capital Housing Authority (NCHA) is responsible for collecting trash and garbage from the vast majority of the public housing units in the District of Columbia. Third, responsibility for trash and garbage collection from privately-owned apartment buildings with more than three living units rests with the landlord owners of such apartment buildings. The authority to enforce the obligation of such landlords and of NCHA to provide adequate trash and garbage collection facilities rests with the defendant Commissioner.

(55) The trash and garbage collection service provided by the Department of Sanitary Engineering to residents of single-family homes and residences with three or less dwelling units is generally far superior to the service provided to public housing tenants by NCHA and to residents of relatively low-income apartment buildings (with more than three units) by the landlords of said buildings. In fact, both NCHA and many of the landlords of such multi-family apartment buildings provide extremely inadequate trash and garbage collection services, with the result that the premises and surroundings of such public housing projects and multi-family apartment buildings are often littered with large quantities of uncollected garbage and trash, creating an unhealthy, unsightly environment and causing the infestation of rats, mice, roaches and other vermin in and about the living quarters of the residents. The defendant Commissioner has failed, moreover, to enforce the obligation of such landlords and of NCHA to provide adequate trash and garbage collection services for the tenants of their buildings.

(56) The system of trash and garbage collection in effect in the District of Columbia thus discriminates unfairly against residents of such multi-family apartment buildings and public housing projects. As a result of the proliferation of low-rent multi-family apartment buildings and public housing projects east of the River, moreover, and the consequent fact that approximately 75 percent of all residents east of the River live in such apartments and over 62 percent of all public housing tenants reside east of the River, the inadequacies and inequities of the City's trash collection system are magnified and concentrated in the area east of the Anacostia River. Despite this problem, neither the defendant Commissioner nor the defendant Council members have taken steps to change the system of trash and garbage collection or otherwise to improve the refuse collection services afforded residents of the area east of the River. On the contrary,