Backyard trash pick-up. Should this continue?

[Gary Rice]

Should Lakewood convert to a curbside pick-up procedure as a cost-saving measure, or keep the present system of backyard rubbish pick-up?

My first reaction to this issue would be to want to retain the backyard haul-outs and find other ways to trim the budget. It would be rough for the elderly or physically challenged to get their garbage (and cans) out to the curbside, particularly in snowy weather. Additionally, I would suspect that additional shoveling would be required to accomodate curbside needs in wintertime.

With the amount of taxes that we pay in Lakewood, I feel that backyard waste pick-up continues to be an attractive feature of Lakewood city services to homes, and should continue.

That's my point of view. How say you?

[Jim O'Bryan]

That's my point of view. How say you?

Gary

On one hand.

It is one thing that has always made Lakewood different and stand out.

The cost savings is minimal, and I fear one step closer to privatization.

What si the cost of the new equipment,

What is the cost to home owners?

What about their ability and cost in picking up the garbage that will inevitable blow around?

What is the cost for a second system to help elderly, and handicapped?

On the other hand

Over half of the city either does not get backyard pick up, or does not know.

Maybe we should get some priorities set before more cuts.

This gets into defining and branding a city. One would think that the current administration would like to cater to the younger resident. 20 - 40 year old. And is quickly trying to shake the geriatric image that has defined much of Lakewood for such a long time.

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[Gary Rice]

Jim,

All good thoughts.

Didn't you have an innovative plan for all this using billy goats?

I thought there was a picture somewhere.....

[Missy Limkemann]

What worries me about this is a street like mine. At the end of my street is the apartment complex, and everyone parks on the street, and how would the robot arm get around the parked cars to my garbage. And a family of 4, a rescue here with lots of garbage, what happens if I have more garbage than the "container" will hold? Do I have to buy more containers that work with the truck? How much do these garbage cans cost? If we fill more than 1 do we get a fee assessed for the overflow? What about winter time? Remember last year when we had over 20 inches of snow? Will all that snow affect the trucks?
Aughhh so many questions....LOL.

[Jim O'Bryan]

Didn't you have an innovative plan for all this using billy goats?

http://lakewoodobserver.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6067&highlight=goat

This was a Steve Davis/O'Bryan project


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[Charlie Page]

Backyard pickup is something that sounds great. Ideally, if everyone participated there would be no trash bags or cans on the tree lawn. However, cars are parked in driveways and the refuse guys can’t always get to your backyard so a lot of people bring their trash to the tree lawn.

I’m in favor of eliminating backyard pickup. We, including elderly residents, currently put our recyclables and yard waste out front. Why not the trash as well?

I’m also in favor of enforcing the ordinance of anyone who puts their trash out front more than a day ahead of their scheduled pickup.

On page 3 of the 2009 City of Lakewood Budget Assumptions, the ‘2009 Appropriations Ordinance assumes the City will transition from backyard refuse pickup to automated curbside pickup with an estimated cost reduction is $600,000’. However there will be ‘at least $2.5 million in capital expenditures for the purchase of the new vehicles and containers’.

I’m not exactly sure what ‘automated’ means or what the new vehicles and containers are for as I wasn’t able to attend the Refuse Department budget hearing this past Tuesday. I can only speculate it would operate something like the Recyclebank video. Each resident will get some kind of container and this will be required to be rolled to the curb every week. The new vehicles would come along and do the heavy lifting of trash into the truck.

If this is how it’s going to work, it might cut down the number of injuries due to all that lifting those guys do. The City would save on workers comp claims and health care costs too.

[Gary Rice]

From what I've just read, it seems they want to supply residents with a single receptacle. As most of the residents I know around here use more than one trash can per week, this could get real interesting.

Even if you could stuff all your weekly trash into one can, how you'd be able to get it out to the curb, if you had any kind of disability or age issues would be real interesting too.

I too, wonder how they'd get around all those parked cars and snow mounds, on the one side of most Lakewood streets?

It's one thing to rake a few leaves and drop a blue bag onto the tree lawn, but quite another to pack a week's worth of trash into one barrel, and hope you'll be able to push or pull it out to the curb without injury. With my back particularly, I don't see how I could manage it very well.

[Gary Rice]

P.S.

All of this may become a moot point anyway. On the one hand, the economy encourages us to BUY! CONSUME! USE UP! and on the other, we're supposed to limit our toss-aways. You just can't seem to win.

The way things are going these days, there may be precious little that people can afford to buy anyway, so there may be a lot less to throw away.

[Jim O'Bryan]

With my back particularly, I don't see how I could manage it very well.

This gets into defining and branding a city. One would think that the current administration would like to cater to the younger resident. 20 - 40 year old. And is quickly trying to shake the geriatric image that has defined much of Lakewood for such a long time.
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[Will Brown]

One of my sons lives in San Diego where they have the automated pickup. Each house (I've never seen anything other than a single house in his neighborhoods) gets two plastic containers; one for trash and one for recyclables. The containers are much larger than our garbage cans here, and have wheels, so moving them to the curb involves no lifting, but could still be difficult for the elderly or handicapped. They don't have the option of an extra container, so if they have too much trash they either drive to the dump (and pay) or save it for the next scheduled pickup. As they will never fail to tell you, weather is never a problem there; I guess when they have a forest fire in the neighborhood they could just toss in the extra trash they are saving. Onstreet parking there is as bad as it is here, so when the pickup truck comes around, the crew wheels the container out into the street where the truck can grab it; I'm not sure we could do that here, when so many of us don't bother to clear the snow, and the trucks would be blocking most of our streets for, I think, a longer time.

That's just how they do it in San Diego, and if we do it here anything could change.

I like the back yard pickup, primarily because the cans left on the tree lawn seem to very often end up in the street, making driving more difficult, and partly for aesthetics.

I'd also be interested in knowing where the labor for seasonal services, such as snow removal, park maintenance, and leaf pickup, comes from. If this labor is from the crew of sanitation workers, what will we do about those services if we dramatically reduce the pool of sanitation workers.

[c. dawson]

well, I grew up out in Mentor, and we've had the automated pickup there since I was in my late teens. The garbage cans are nice ... big and robust, and hold pretty much everything you can toss out, aside from furniture and building materials. They wheel quite easily, and pickup with the trucks and robotic arms seems very easy and quick. They still have the same service to this day, many years later, and according to my folks, they've never had a problem with quality of service.

If anything, I thought the backyard pickup in Lakewood was kind of odd ... all those guys in the cushmans scooting back and forth multiple times, trucks coming to pick up yard waste, then recycling, then the garbage, it just all seemed really wasteful of taxpayer money. Perhaps it was unique, but I think it's time for it to go, if this system can work with cars parked on the street, which I think it can.

[Mark Crnolatas]

I know this is rather a minor point, but for example, we fill 6+ garbage cans easily, as well as many of our neighbors. Do we want all the garbage cans to line our streets to provide a visual impression we might not want,?

Makes for a less than appealing image in my mind, at least.

Mark Crnolatas

[Ed FitzGerald]

We have some basic information at onelakewood.com, but we'll keep supplementing it; we'll be putting up a FAQ page and some videos of how it might work. The Observer is providing a useful forum to help us identify potential concerns.

We're proposing this change in order to save money by: lowering workers compensation claims, saving on fuel, reducing personnel costs, and lowering vehicle maintenance costs. This will enable us to avoid other program cuts or increases in fees or taxes for 2009, while reducing emissions by approximately 100 tons per year at the same time. We don't have room in our capital budget to automate recycling for 2009, but we are still exploring that. Other communities have experienced an increase in recycling when they switch to automated curbside pickup, and we are hoping to design a sytem to promote that (we already have one of the highest recycling participation rates in the area, but we have room for improvement.)

This isn't being proposed to cater to younger people, I don't quite understand that. We will have a backup system for anyone who is physically unable to put out their trash on the the wheeled carts. In most cities, the numbers of residents needing that service is less than 2%. We're designing a system with enough flexibility for special needs and situations.

This is part of my solution to our budget crisis; City Council is free to reject it, and instead increase revenue through charges, fees, or taxes, or cut other programs to save an equivalent amount. I would encourage anyone with questions or concerns to attend upcoming hearings on the matter.

[Gary Rice]

Thank you, Your Honor, for your responsiveness to these concerns.

I do fully and sincerely believe that you, and council want to do the right thing, and of course, to economize where necessary in these troubled times.

But...I do hope that we will think this all through VERY carefully first.

Ever notice?

It's always the weak and infirm, who suffer first in a society.

The elderly already have lost services to their senior centers with the recent cuts.

They're a lot like the canaries in the proverbial coal mines. Their collapse is only a harbinger of so much more to come for the rest of us.

I'm glad that the Mayor indicated that there would be exceptions allowed, although as a retired Special Education teacher, I would suggest that statistically, far more than 2% of a given society will need extra assistance, particularly with manual labor.

We have to be careful with any potential law that might cause elderly and infirm residents to try to move refrigerator-sized recepticles hundreds of feet each week through the snow. That would be unfair, unjust, and immoral on its face. How many might potentially be hospitalized or simply die from exertion, trying to meet the city's demands?

Would all of the potential savings equal the loss of even one human life?

Aside from the obvious legal challenges that would inevitably arise for those unable to comply, there would remain the larger question of compassion and understanding. Know this: Any of us who are healthy today, could be hospitalized tomorrow. I thought I was fine until one day last spring, I found myself in the hospital unable to walk because I tried to move a few things. Fortunately, I walk now, but you can well bet that pushing and lifting are activities that I have to be exceedingly careful about.

We need to be flexible enough so that we do not steamroll conviction over compassion.

Sadly, more seems to be eroding from "old Lakewood" these days, than the earthworks along Lake Erie's shore....

[Mike Coleman]

Since I started recycling more, the amount of trash I put out back has dropped by more than 50%. At least as much goes out to the curb now than goes in the back in the trash cans, and this is with a family of five. Practically anything plastic, paper or cardboard can be recycled. I hope any new policy the city institutes encourages recycling among the residents.