Once-a-week backdoor garbage collection would be “an absolute disaster,” Public Works Director James Morgan is prepared to tell City Council members tonight.
“I can’t see what all the fuss about rolling it to the street is,” Morgan said in an interview Wednesday.
Council member Mary Emma Evans applied the “disaster” label Tuesday night to Morgan’s proposal to switch Henderson from twice-a-week backyard pickup to weekly curbside collection. Echoing the sentiments they expressed in April when they first saw Morgan’s proposal, Evans and Mike Rainey said they will not vote for the change, and Bernard Alston hinted that he feels the same way after being bombarded with opposition to the idea when it first arose.
It didn’t matter that more than three-fourths of North Carolina cities collect garbage only at the curbside, nor that an even higher percentage pick up the garbage only once a week. The council members didn’t think that the move to the curb would be worth saving $119,000 in fiscal 2005-06, as Williams projects in his proposed budget.
The savings would compound over the years because the Public Works Department would be able to reduce its work force through attrition and operate half as many garbage trucks, Morgan said. The first-year savings might not meet expectations, however, because the city would have to enter a $450,000 lease-purchase arrangement to buy 5,800 garbage bins for residences and would not know how fast attrition would cut the sanitation staff.
In a concession to the statewide trend and to the city’s financial constraints, Rainey made a counterproposal to keep backyard collection but do it once a week, an idea Evans endorsed. The council asked City Manager Eric Williams to run the numbers on how much that change would save compared with twice-a-week pickup.
But Morgan didn’t need a spreadsheet to answer that question: Weekly garbage collection at the back door wouldn’t save a dime and could prove more costly than the present pickup schedule. It would be “an absolute disaster.”
Rainey anticipated the no-savings answer during Tuesday’s meeting of the Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee, and he said he doesn’t believe it. Rainey said it has to be quicker, and thus cheaper, to take garbage trucks down the city’s narrow, winding residential streets once a week instead of twice.
Morgan explained why he thinks Rainey is wrong. Because backyard collection involves manually transferring garbage from a resident’s garbage can to a city bin, to be rolled to the street and the truck, the time the task takes depends on the amount of garbage. If there’s twice as much garbage awaiting pickup, it basically takes twice as long for the sanitation worker to get the garbage to the truck. The trucks therefore can cover only half as much territory in a day.
By contrast, under curbside collection, it takes the same amount of time to dump one of the proposed 90-gallon rolling cans into a truck whether the can is stuffed to the brim or almost empty.
Once-a-week backyard collection could prove more expensive than the current system because of the increased risk of workers’ compensation claims as sanitation workers handle more garbage at once. That risk disappears under the curbside program because the sanitation workers don’t have to lift the bags; they just roll the bins into position.
Morgan also disagreed with Evans that curbside collection would be a blow to the Clean Up Henderson Committee’s efforts of the past two years. He said curbside collection is “the cleanest way to do it.”
He explained that the city-provided 90-gallon bins would securely hold all of a household’s weekly garbage, ensuring that the garbage ends up where it’s supposed to go, inside the garbage truck, instead of being knocked or blown out of an open container in the back yard.
The cities with curbside collection “are cleaner than we are,” Morgan said.
As for the oft-repeated concern that the shift to curbside collection would pose a hardship for the elderly and others unable to roll a garbage bin to the street, the public works director said he would compile a list of people with such problems, and the sanitation staff would continue to collect the garbage at the house. For those people, nothing would change.
Morgan said newcomers are amazed to learn that they’re not supposed to take their garbage to the curb once a week. “When they hear, they say, ‘You’re kidding,’ ” Morgan said. “Every place they’ve lived, you go to the curb.”
He said he has wanted to make the change for a decade, although this is the first time he put the plan in his budget.
Williams said he included the curbside plan in his budget proposal — despite the hostile reaction the idea received in previous FAIR Committee meetings — because of the long-term budget implications. He said the city needs to give up its gold-standard sanitation service at some point, and now is as good a year as any.
“I think this is the way to go,” Morgan said. “After several months, no one would complain.”
Council members will have a chance to complain and to quiz Morgan about alternatives at a FAIR Committee meeting tonight at 7 at the Municipal Building.