Hawthorne Neighborhood pays $428.76 to pick up 25 phone books! $13,720 to follow?

I checked my email this morning and found I had an email from the Jordan Hawkman. It was pretty extensive and obvious a fair amount of time went into the research that he had done. Jeff Skrenes is at it again on the JNS blog yesterday where he wrote about his adventures of collecting phone books from vacant houses and taking them ALL THE WAY BACK to Dex's offices! Rather than attempt to steal Jordan Hawkman's thunder, I will let his words tell you about how Jeff Skrenes wastes neighborhood money.

JNS Blog: Phone Books Returned to Dex

"Hawthorne Neighborhood pays $428.76 to pick up 25 phone books! $13,720 to follow?


We were doing a little figuring to see how much it costs residents to recycle phone books in Hawthorne. First we looked at the Hawthorne Web site to review their budget. We found that the $291,352 Hawthorne Community Council’s budget (1) included $106,500 in expenses unrelated to staff. There were some categories in the 5500 category that could may be considered unrelated to staff, however we included them because much of the information included in them involves fundraising to pay for expenses of the staff. The criteria for determining if the category is related to staff or not was simply this “If there was not staff, then would thin expense be there?” When the answer was yes, we added the figure to our total.

One must remember that a salary does not simply reveal the cost of employee. The cost of having 3 staff for the Hawthorne Community Council is $183,852 or $61,284 each. Let’s just say for arguments sake the costs are divided equally 3 ways between staff costs to the community

For the year of 2010 there are 261 weekdays, of which 6 holidays are included that (we included 1 day for Christmas 2010 as eve/day falls on Fri/Sat). We also assumed that the staff gets two weeks of total comp. time. This adjustment reduces the actual working days to 245 for the 2010 year. With an average of 7 hours per day (after extracting two fifteen minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch per day), we come up with come up with a total of 1715 working hours in the year of 2010.

$61,284 divided by 1715 (actual working hours total) = $35.73/hr

So what did the residents of Hawthorne receive for their $35.73/hr on June 2nd 2010?

Jeff Skrenes, staff member of the Hawthorne Community Council mentioned that he strolled around the neighborhood (2) collecting 25 phone books from properties. Let’s say Mr. Skrenes is very efficient and hunts down 1 phone book every 7 minutes while running up the steps, depositing his treasure in the trunk, buckling up and scouting for the next phone book to be discovered. This would equate to 175 minutes or around 3 hours. Then Mr. Skrenes drive out to the suburbs to return the phone books to the receptionist. We estimate this process would likely take at least 2 hours round trip. Then Mr. Skrenes time for blogging in his private blog he writes two entries related to the phone books totaling just fewer than 2700 words plus comments.

Let’s estimate that Skrenes is a phenomenal typist and thinks, writes, and proofs at the rate of 19 words per minute for composition (3). This would equal 142.11 minutes. There is also time that must be allotted for multiple pictures taken, posted and dropped into the posts along with the multiple links to you tube sites (one typical example is Ernie from Sesame Street singing “connecting the dots”). This time easily triples bringing the blogging time to just over 7 hours.

This brings us to our grand total of 12 hours @ 35.73/hr = $428.76 or $17.15 for each phone book collected. Hey I have an idea, perhaps I should simply do what the City of Minneapolis Web site (4) suggests. Put them in my recycling bin. That is free and does not cost anything. Mr. Skrenes suggests that there are an additional 800 phone books left for him to collect on his list. The estimate for him to collect this balance of phone books at this rate would be $13,720 for just the Dex phone books. Just think about the possibilities of collecting Yellow books, neighborhood coupon flyers and other items.

…..Or, we could just put them in the recycling bins for free. Better yet, since there is a $6,000.00 fee for vacant Building registration in the City of Minneapolis. One could request that the department of inspection simply take 5 minutes to print off a copy or email the list of vacant properties to the vendors such as Dex, Yellow Book and others upon request.

Total cost, 5 minutes and a few stamps. Oh yeah, this would service all 80 plus neighborhoods and not just Hawthorne.

I am not a paid neighborhood housing director paid to come up with these streamlining ideas to fit both the needs of the neighborhood as well as the pocketbook. Upon second thought, it appears that a common sense idea like this would likely make too much sense for Hawthorne and its current Housing Director Jeff Skrenes."

Great work Jordan!

-Anti-Johnny