Changes made earlier this year to the Electric City’s garbage pickup service could be temporarily suspended. Trash collection could be the first contentious issue the new council faces in January.
For years, Schenectady residents have been placing their oversize trash items on the side of the road, knowing that a garbage truck would come by and pick them up.
But that changed when the council voted earlier this year to alter the city’s bulk refuse collection process.
The council created a program in which residents have to purchase stickers directly from City Hall to place on large trash items like mattresses or old dressers — otherwise these items will not be picked up.
Councilman Carl Williams says the program, which has faced significant public opposition, was meant to help tackle the city’s trash problem.
“I think in a normal just week, week-and-a-half process you can assume people put out a few numbers of bags, maybe a chair or broken item, what our waste department would recognize as you get to households, and then there would be 20 bags, there would be two couches, mattresses, dressers and at that point does it truly reflect taxes that are attributed to waste removal in the city,” Williams said.
But now, the council is considering a resolution to temporarily suspend the trash sticker program for 60 days to give leaders a chance to review its effectiveness.
Williams says while he appreciates the council trying out new ideas like the sticker program, reevaluating it is the right move.
“Any change would have been destructive, but sincerely the barriers to where you can pick them up at, the barriers to how you can pay for them, just made it more cumbersome for people to just get rid of their waste,” Williams said.
With the new year right around the corner, a final decision on the future of the city’s trash sticker program will likely fall on the shoulders of the new council, set to take office in January. The all-Democratic council will see two new faces. They include Hayden Engert, who currently works as the vice chair of the city’s Planning Commission. He says the sticker program is a disaster and is something he campaigned on changing.
“It’s ridiculous, I believe it was every single door we got to, people would say ‘Oh, my god, why did you institute this, why did they do this, how can we fix this.’ And I made the promise to people that that would be one of the first things I think that we should look at; is garbage collection,” Engert said.
He says the city’s garbage collection problem is symbolic of a larger issue within the council itself.
“The overall problem we’ve seen, and I think it’s the problem we have seen with everything, is that the council decides to do something, they stand by it for a couple of months and then they say, ‘oh, that’s not working.’” Engert said.
A public hearing on the program’s temporary suspension is scheduled to take place at the council’s meeting this evening.
According to Williams, the measure will head to committee for further consideration after the hearing.
From there, the issue could head back to the City Council for a final determination.
Even so, Engert said he does not think there was a lot of thought put into the temporary suspension, and he contends it should have been put into place sooner.
“I think it was very much one of those ‘We’re on our way out the door, we want to make ourselves look good and we are just going to do this,” Engert said.
