Even More Taxpayer-Financed Campaigning

Yesterday's mail contained a very interesting delivery. As a city resident, this is the time of year when we usually await – but do not often receive – our trash pickup and recycling calendars from the city government. These multi-colored calendars tell us when we should expect our regular trash pickup, when to set out the recycling, and when the city will be collecting bulky items. While they cover an entire calendar year, the city has often failed to get them sent until late January or early February.

In the past, these calendars haven't exactly been works of art. They've just been your basic, 12-month calendar with the collection days highlighted in various colors. A sample calendar for the current year can be found here, at least until the city decides to take it down at the end of the year. As you can see, they are pretty basic in graphical style, but they were more than adequate to get the job done.

So yesteday, we received a new garbage-collection mailing from the city. Not the actual calendar, but an oversized postcard. In fact, this thing is seriously oversized at 11 full inches wide and 4 inches tall. On one side, highlighed in big bold letters on a red background, it screams "New GARBAGE collection day". On the other side, with the same highlighting, it screams "Your GARBAGE COLLECTION DAY may have CHANGED". Clearly, with it's unusual size, bright red highlighting, and big bold ALL CAP lettering, this is a city mailing that one should pay close attention to.

Of course, it also contains one other thing on both sides of the card. You might have already guessed what appears there:

By the way, if you look very carefully at the image, you can see that our mayor has his tumbs stuck down into the waistband of his pants. Kinda makes you wonder where he puts them when he isn't being photgraphed, doesn't it? Note to self; pack hand sanitizer when attending any Ravenstahl campaign events, to be used post-handshake.

In addition to the image itself, the front of the postcard also lists "LUKE RAVENSTAHL/MAYOR" in big bold letters on a bright purple background. This extra notice must be there just in case we had forgotten who he is, or hadn't noticed the black-on-gold notice within either of the two "REDD UP" graphics at the tops of both sides of the card. The biggest message being sent here, in case you missed it, is that the Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh is Luke Ravenstahl. That's LUKE RAVENSTAHL, everybody, king of the ALL CAPS TYPEFACE!

Oh, but the really interesting thing about this mailing is that, at least here in my neighborhood, our garbage collection day did not change. Despite the boldfaced warnings that we really needed to pay close attention, garbage collection will still be on Wednesdays next year, just like it has been for the last two years. So the only relevant announcement for us is that city will be moving from a once-per-month pickup of bulky items to picking up a smaller number of bulk items every single week. That's nice to know, but they could have just told us the same thing when they get around to sending us our regular calendars in a few months.

Anyone want to bet that these caledars, when they finally arrive, also feature the Ravenstahl "REDD UP" graphic, so that his image will be magnetically afixed to every refrigerator in the city for the entire year? That would be, of course, the entire election year.

There probably are people in other parts of the city who will see their regular garbage collection day change at the first of the year. These people definitely need to be told what their new day will be be. To handle this notification, the city could have sent a regular-sized postcard to only those homes in the affected areas. That would have saved a bundle on printing and postage costs. It also would have been a far more sensible and efficient method to distribute this news to the people who were affected by these changes.

But it clearly would not have been the most sensible and efficient method to distribute campaign literature less than two weeks after the Mayor announced his candidacy. And quite obviously, that's precisely what these mailings were intended to be. Taxpayer-financed pictures of Master Ravenstahl are popping up everywhere you look, and at least some of us are wondering about the political motivations that are behind it all.