There are some things you need to know about St. Paul if you are moving here. We have our little idiosyncrasies and our big city and small town ways. It doesn’t say anything about alleys, trash removal or water in the glossy brochures that organizations like Explore Minnesota and Visit Saint Paul publish.
1. You are on your own for hiring a trash hauler and each home along an alley might have a different hauler picking up and a different day so you can expect a fair amount of trash hauler traffic in your alley. Along some alleys neighbors coordinate trash removal and everyone uses the same hauler to lessen the noise and environmental impact of trash removal.
2. We don’t leave our trash cans in front of our homes like they do in the burbs. If your hauler asks you to do that and you have an alley find another hauler.
3. The city does not plow the alleys after a snow but sometimes neighbors work together and do it themselves or split the cost of hiring a service.
4. There is no public Wifi in St. Paul. We are all on our own.
5. There is no need to buy bottled water. Tap water is drinkable and a filter can be added to make the water taste just like bottled water but at a fraction of the cost and environmental impact as bottled water.
6. I have done some comparisons and people who live in St. Paul pay a little more for water than people who live in California pay but in say los Angeles for example you can easily find a per gallon price of .039 but in St. Paul all you can find are charges that are so complex that it would take a room full of mathematicians days to come up with a per gallon cost. *We do know that the first 100,000 cubic feet of water used each month is billed at $ 3.77 per 100 cubic feet. We pay between $40 and $50 a month for water and it is billed quarterly.
* If anyone from the city is reading this I have an idea. Why not put the cost of water in English and figure out how much a gallon costs taking into consideration the total number of gallons used a month and if the user if commercial or residential.
