On Dec. 21, the Concord bulk leaf collection finally hit my street. They were using two loaders instead of a vacuum, perhaps because many leaf piles were frozen. The crew was surprisingly cheerful in spite of the steady rain. Maybe they, like residents, were tired of excuses from higher-ups and just wanted to get it done.
The recent David Brooks column (Monitor front page, Dec. 20) on leaf collection is full of misinformation. Bulk leaf collection started Oct. 29 when over half my leaves were still on the trees, not mid-November. While bulk collection may have occurred twice per year in a bygone era, in three of the four past years some areas of the city were not reached even once. Adding “bagged” (which for the environmentally conscious allows reusable containers) collection this fall provided a useful option, particularly to those residents early or late on the schedule.
What was different this year was an early snowstorm in which neophyte truck drivers pushed leaf piles from gutters onto sidewalks. In my case, the plow went over a foot onto the sidewalk to move leaves previously along the curbline into a large lump of ice/leaf mixture that blocked the full width of the sidewalk for half the width of my driveway. This was too solid to move with a snow shovel and too dense for a snow blower.
The people I called at General Services were out and didn’t return my calls, but a city council member told me that this problem was so widespread that the city had decided to do nothing about it. I estimate that pushing the leaves back into the gutter would take roughly the same time as it took to push them out, or maybe one to two hours to redo the affected plow routes backward, but that was apparently too long for something not affecting Main Street.
The sad thing is that most of those leaves didn’t need to be put out yet, but General Services refuses to specify in advance which one-quarter of the city will be picked up in the next week.
By removing leaves from the outside of the pile as they melted out, I was able to eliminate the blob blocking my driveway during the three weeks of bagged collection. Not everyone was so ambitious, and until today there were two places on my block alone where the sidewalk was obstructed by frozen leaves so you needed to walk in the street.
Somehow I doubt that Main Street businesses would have tolerated it if the city had blocked their sidewalks for five weeks, and I’m not sure why residents should either.
Next year, there needs to be a posted order of bulk collection so residents can better predict arrival, and a plan to quickly clear leaves from sidewalks if the city puts them there.
(Roy Schweiker lives in Concord.)