Don’t expect the City Council to do anything different with garbage collection or recycling this year if they listen to the public feedback to the mere suggestion of changes.
Chatting after Monday night’s budget session at the Municipal Building, council members couldn’t say enough about the negative response to Public Works Director James Morgan’s proposals to switch from twice-a-week, backyard garbage collection to once-a-week, curbside pickup and to eliminate the biweekly recycling pickup.
“The people who don’t want us to make the changes are very vocal,” Bernard Alston said.
“They want to keep it like it is,” Mike Rainey said.
Alston said people are calling, e-mailing, visiting his office and stopping him in the streets to tell him they want to keep backyard garbage collection. Lonnie Davis said much the same.
One man has told Rainey that if the council were to stop the backyard pickup, “he’d be up here with a thousand people.”
“You better believe it,” Ranger Wilkerson said.
“They’re saying, basically, ‘We know you’re going to cut out something. Don’t cut out this,’ ” Alston said.
“This is what you hear every year,” City Manager Eric Williams said. “No one wants you to cut anything.”
Harriette Butler said people don’t want to put garbage beside the street “because that’s going to defeat Clean Up Henderson,” and they don’t want to get rid of recycling.
“I usually don’t get a lot of calls,” Alston said. This is an exception.
Williams said he has been to neighborhoods in other cities with million-dollar homes where the residents must roll 90-gallon bins to the street, just as Morgan has recommended.
Davis said the problem is that cities with such programs require residents to get the bins to the curb by a certain time and to remove the bins by a certain time. “The garbage man has to be very punctual.”
Williams said he’d like to run a trial of curbside garbage collection in one neighborhood
“The thing is selecting the neighborhood,” Alston said. “If you picked my neighborhood, I would get shot.”
Williams said a neighborhood would have to volunteer, an idea Elissa Yount seconded in a later interview. She suggested that if the city promised extra attention or services for the neighborhood in such a pilot program, the city would likely get volunteers.
As for the recycling program, Rainey and Alston said former Mayor Chick Young advised them not to get rid of it.
Council members discussed the city’s participation rate in the curbside recycling program, which Morgan said is 42 percent to 43 percent each month.
Davis said that’s an improvement from the lowest point, when participation fell as low as 30 percent, and Butler said she suspects participation is closer to 50 percent now.
Participation is “100 percent on my street,” Rainey said.
Davis said his big problem is remembering when to carry the green recycling bin to the street because Waste Industries makes its circuit of the city only once every two weeks.
“The only way I ever know the day is I’ve got some neighbors that are real schedule-oriented, and I just look out, and if the bins are out there, I say, ‘Well,’ ” Williams said.