It’s breathtaking how fast the City of Greensboro can move when city staff wants to get something done.
On Thursday, Aug. 10, the Greensboro City Council discussed a proposed ordinance to do away with loose leaf collection, and on Tuesday, Aug. 15, the ordinance ending loose leaf collection is on the City Council meeting agenda for a vote.
The City Council has considered ending loose leaf collection for years, but the public outcry whenever the topic was discussed deterred the council from taking action. Councilmembers have said that they have never received so many letters, emails, texts, calls and contacts about any other city initiative. But the short window between when the topic was discussed and when the vote will take place should greatly reduce the number of contacts from angry constituents the city councilmembers will receive.
Since the new leaf collection program will not go into effect for the 2023-2024 leaf season, which officially starts Nov. 1, there isn’t any real rush on getting the ordinance passed, except the longer the City Council waits to vote the more time opponents have to make their voices heard.
Instead of raking leaves to the street where they are vacuumed up by city crews, the new program calls for each residence to receive a 95 gallon bin, similar to the green garbage and brown recycling bins the city currently provides, except the yard waste bin will be gray.
The gray yard waste container will be collected each week on the same day as garbage is collected. In addition to the yard waste bin, each week residents can place 10 biodegradable paper bags of yard waste including leaves and grass clippings on the street. The biodegradable paper bags currently cost about 50 cents each. Plastic bags will not be collected by the city.
During leaf season from Nov. 1 to the second week in February, residents will be allowed to place 15 biodegradable paper bags of leaves on the street each week in addition to the 95 gallon yard waste bin.
During the work session discussion, Councilmember Hugh Holston questioned why the city had not run a pilot program with a neighborhood to see if the new plan would work.
Councilmember Nancy Hoffmann asked if a calculation had been done to determine how many bags would be used by a typical resident.
One of the reasons given for ending loose leaf collection was that only 40 percent of the residents of Greensboro used the service.
Mayor Nancy Vaughan said, “Lots of people don’t use the library. I think you can say that about just about every city department across the board.”
If they are going to cut a service that we are currently paying for to save money, I expect them to cut the tax rate accordingly.!!!
Rather than work to improve the city’s poor performance on a needed service, they plan to keep our tax money and provide a fraction of the service. I can’t wait for the first collection when a rain drenches all the paper bags. This is going to be a nightmare. One 95 gallon container per week plus a few bags? I’ll be piling leaves just to offload a few each week from Sept to about July. We need a few real leaders in our city.
Council is nothing more than self serving turds. You voted for them.
Mary Kay told us something different.
Currently I use yard cans to put leaves and debris from storms in. Can yard cans still be used? These just require being picked up and dumped into the truck picking them up. There is nothing else to purchase or have to keep on hand. Also, the paper bags that will be required; what happens when we get heavy ran and these become wet? How will they perform in this type of weather? Just not sure this has been well thought out. Other people I’ve talked to that do this say they have a lot of problems with the paper bags. There’s no way one 95 gallon trash bin is going to hold the amount of leaves that I see along Hobbs Road and other heavily treed areas in town. It seems as though a really nice service is being dismantled I guess to provide additional services of questionable nature. It is unfortunate that we will be losing this service meanwhile tax rates go up. Pay more and get less. People sure have been getting a lot of that lately.
It is time to make sure we take a stand. The city council will delay and delay and hope we forget about it and then all of a sudden they will vote how they want with no input from the taxpayers. Do not let them pull the wool over our eyes like they do on so many other pet projects they may have.
If they do vote for this I will work against every Council person who does vote against loose leaf collection and will do every legal thing I can do to obstruct them and their pet programs…
Just disobey and refuse to comply.
Will someone please explain to nancy the difference between a library and loose leaf collection
So, I plan to rake my leaves out to the curb anyway. They can rot there instead of on my expensively well-kept lawn. If City don’t care, I don’t care
If the city followed the idea that ending a service was reasonable because only about 40% of the people used it I figure we could cut just about all services and do away with all taxes. Generally, on a weekly basis, I figure fewer than 40% of people use the police, fire, EMS, library, and courts (and possibly free clinics, Medicaid, and SNAP benefits based on a quick check.) So we could discontinue all those services also. That leaves water, sewage, and education which seriously cuts the city budget and saves tons of taxes. Let’s do it!
I would like to know where our informed Mayor gets the 40 percent from? Another example of
“creative accounting” ?
So from asking around, the people I spoke with said that the paper bags work fine as long as they do not get very wet. Once they have gotten really wet they start to break down and may require that a shovel be used to pick them up. Now I am going to suggest that these bags will be sitting at the curb exactly where the bulk of the water will be often for 7 days. Even with light rain, mist, or heavy dew/frost, almost every bag in the city may need to be individually shoveled into the truck. I am not convinced this is going to be the labor-saving change they all seem to think it is. Street after street of 30-gallon bags full of wet leaves with a rotten bottoms will be quite a challenge and I suspect a pain in the hiney as well.
The silver lining to this is it might finally lead to a large replacement of the current council.