I grew up in a small suburb just outside of a major city, overall a pretty liberal and urbanized place.

The town had it’s own garbage trucks, all the years I lived there I never remember them missing a trash pickup. The neighboring towns didn’t have their own trucks but still provided municipal pickup just contracted through some company and they were similarly pretty good.

I now live towards the more rural end of that same county. I’d still consider it to be in the suburbs, but it’s a much less densely populated area, with some woods and a handful of small farms around, and while still fairly liberal, it definitely skews more conservative than the town I grew up in.

So this town does not provide trash service for its residents. It’s pretty much up to everyone to make their own arrangements with any of a half dozen or so trash companies in the area.

And it’s an absolute shit-show. They’re all constantly missing trash pickups, constantly raising their prices, one time the company I was with got bought out by another company and they decided they were going to stop providing residential pickup service in my area so I had to find another company to take my money, and because we have all of these different companies with different pickup schedules it seems like anywhere you go there’s constantly a trash truck slowing down traffic.

Because the libertarian dipshits in my area would rather pay more for worse service than abide by a smaller bump in their taxes to get reliable municipal services.

Similarly a lot of roads in my area are bullshit tar & chips instead of proper paving, it doesn’t last long, loose stones are always getting kicked up, the motorcycle riders in my area complain that they’re dangerous, etc.

A lot of my town is on wells and septic tanks instead of city water and sewer. There are allegedly plans to expand the parts of the town that can get hooked up to the municipal water and sewer lines, but they’ve been saying that at least since I moved here about 5 years ago and I haven’t seen any real progress on that. I am hooked up to the municipal lines, but I have some friends who aren’t and are hoping to get hooked up to it, and every time they ask they get told that their street is on the list to get hooked up but no one seems to know when, so they’re constantly juggling whether they want to do some overdue maintenance on their aging septic system or if it’s worth toughing it out until they eventually can get hooked up.

And probably the worst is the police department (InB4 ACAB) it’s a part time department so they’re not actually on duty overnight or most weekends and our area gets covered by state police when they’re not on duty (which I believe the town actually pays for)

Now if there’s any town that could probably get away with just not having its own police department, it’s probably mine. I work in the county dispatch center, I know what their workload is like, if they handle a dozen incidents a week, including traffic stops for speeding tickets and such, they’ve had a busy week.

But of course most of what does happen in town is overnight and over the weekend, because that’s when people are home. We don’t exactly have a lot of businesses in town, so most people are just straight-up not around during the day.

The state police coverage is terrible. They cover a pretty large area of other semi rural departments without their own police or part time departments like mine, so often when they’re needed the only available troopers are a couple towns away.

They also will only enforce state laws, and won’t bother themselves with any local ordinances, so if you have, for example, a noise complaint, you’re SOL, because odds are your neighbors are having loud parties and shooting off fireworks after the local police are off-duty for the night. They might be able to cite them for it later, but no one’s gonna be going out to shut them up right now while you’re trying to sleep.

No one likes the state police coverage, but they also don’t want to pay the taxes it would take to have an actual full-time police department. A couple years ago there was talk of joining up with a couple neighboring towns that are currently covered full-time by state police, to form a full-time regional department that would cover all 3 towns, but those other towns also didn’t want to increase taxes to pay for it.