The University-Daily Kansan
If you’re trying to rile up someone from Lawrence — you figure talking about recycling, unemployment and parking downtown ought to do it — then bring up the city’s new discussion on trash collection.
In early September, the city council told city staff to come up with a menu of options for the future of the city’s trash collection. In late November, the staff sent the council a memo with three main choices. Now, it’s up to the city council and neighborhood associations across the city to weigh in.
“We weren’t trying to generate ‘the solution’ or ‘the right answer,’” said Tammy Bennett, assistant public works director. “We want it to serve as the basis of discussion moving forward.”
The first option is to maintain the status quo, the rear-loaded trucks that require a crew of two or three people with no requirement for citizens to rent a cart.
But the other two options propose buying new technology, such as fully automated trucks with arms to pick up carts, which typically only require a one-person crew. That means fewer trash collectors, less wages and less workers’ compensation the city has to pay out.
One of the options calls for mostly new, fully automated trucks, while the second calls for a mix of those and status quo semi-automated trucks, which would mean crews of one and sometimes two.
The new trucks also touch on a big Lawrence topic: the environment. Any move to fully automated trucks would require residents to rent a cart from the city. The carts would be available in different sizes — 35, 65 and 95 gallons — and would require people to pay more for throwing more away. That’s a positive for the green community.
Bennett said the city heard from residents who wanted the price of disposal to be related to the amount of waste, even measured by trash collectors at the curb.
“That’s really challenging from the technical perspective,” Bennett said. “Not to mention that there’s a real risk of increasing illegal dumping.”
Bennett said the cart system is more “doable” and that other cities have gone to a similar system.
Even beyond the trash collection aspect, the city staff included possible recycling options and goals for reducing waste in the memo, which will spur debate about how the city will handle recycling.
Britten Kuckelman, a junior from Wichita, said the carts might help the environment a little, but the city should be focusing on recycling.
She said the city of Wichita collected both trash and recycle bins, and her family began throwing away more things in the recycle bin than the trash.
“People will do what’s convenient,” Kuckelman said. “Right now, recycling in Lawrence isn’t convenient.”
Also, buying the shiny new trucks comes with a catch. They need space to stick out that arm and pick up the trash, so parking zones might change, especially in the tighter streets around town.
Bennett said the city could never have only fully automated trucks, because the current rear-loaded option is the only way to collect trash in areas like downtown.
Consider the ‘student ghetto,’ the area between campus and downtown Massachusetts Street. It has older, more narrow streets with dense parking.
Caroline Kraft, a junior from Tulsa, Okla., used to live in an apartment near 14th and Tennessee streets. She said parking around there is already strained by a lack of parking space.
“It’s a big problem already,” Kraft said. “The last thing we need is to reduce parking.”
She said regardless of what the city decides to do, it can’t change parking in that tight area without making things worse.
“That would be one place that may always have to have rear-loaded service,” Bennett said.
While a fully automated truck could cost as much as $230,000 — $30,000 more than the truck the city uses now — it would save money in the long term by saving on wages and workers’ compensation for trash collectors.
From 2005 to 2010 so far, the average cost of workers’ compensation for Lawrence trash collectors was more than $215,000 per year, according to the memo from city staff.
Bennett said most customers probably wouldn’t notice much difference in service between a fully automated and semi-automated trash truck. The required carts and altered parking, however, might be a different story.
It’s now up to the city to decide if it wants to start buying the new fully automated trucks, and how many it wants to buy. Neighborhood associations and concerned citizens have a chance to voice their opinion in the coming months. The city commission meets every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
Bennett stressed that the three options laid out aren’t final, or even exclusive. The city’s choice might be a mix of all three, or something entirely else.
“There are tons of options out there,” Bennett said. “This is just a starting point, a first step.”
— Edited by Alex Tretbar
