Cuts to bulk trash service cause uproar at City Council
TAKING ON TRASH: Part of an occasional series on Baltimore’s trash problems and what the city and its residents are doing about them
Above: Trash blows up against the fence of the city maintenance yard on East Madison Street on Monday. In background, an Elgin street sweeper.
The Department of Public Works’ plans to reduce its bulk trash pickup crews from three to two in fiscal year 2016, starting July 1, caused an uproar at City Hall yesterday.
News of the reduction broke during the DPW’s 2016 budget hearing.
It came after an hour-long litany of Council members’ complaints about the city’s endemic trash, rampant rat problems and concerns about the effectiveness of street and alley sweeping. The agency had also announced that it would be ramping up its proactive rat abatement efforts.
Councilman Warren Branch was in rare form, going on a tirade about mattresses in the median strips and piles of trash in his district. He invited Public Works Director Rudy Chow to get in the car with him and go on a trash ride-along.
“We can go right now,” said Branch, telling Chow about a particular mess on the 700 block of North Curley Street, one that Branch claims has been around for months.
But it was Councilman James B. Kraft who was the first to question Chow about the bulk trash service cut. (It appears on page 117 of the FY2016 budget, page 127 of the pdf.)
“We can’t pick up all the bulk trash as it is. You’ve heard everyone here,” Kraft said to Chow, who seemed unaware of the reduction, and turned to Andrew Kleine, the city budget chief, for some clarification.
“The executive summary doesn’t say you are cutting a bulk trash crew,” Kraft said to Chow in apparent disbelief.
Bulk trash in an alley in Baltimore Highlands. (Photo by: Danielle Sweeney)
Bulk Trash is a “Rat Hotel”
The disconnect between the council’s worries over insidious trash and dumping and the DPW’s bottom-line service reduction was pretty clear to everyone in the room.
But just in case it wasn’t, Kraft drove the point home with a ripe metaphor. “We’ve been talking about rat abatement,” he said, “but bulk trash is like a rat hotel.”
On the budget document, the service cut was under the heading “Changes with Service Impacts,” but Kleine defended the reduction and minimized the effect it would have on the city.
“We believe the main [bulk trash] crews can handle the service impact,” he said.
The city’s bulk trash crews perform scheduled residential pickup of bulk trash. Each resident is eligible for a monthly pick-up of as many as three bulk items free of charge.
Jeffrey Raymond, DPW spokesman, clarified in a followup interview with The Brew that “the bulk crews are. . . different from the crews that handle regular curbside pickup or those that respond to illegally dumped trash.” The implication was that a cutback in bulk trash crews would not impact illegal dumping cleanup.
Trash litters the north end of Robinson Street in East Baltimore on Monday. (Photo by Mark Reutter)
Illegal Dumping Everywhere
The reason for the cut, said Kleine, was cost savings and the agency eventually moving toward a fee-for-service model for premium bulk trash pick up.
“About a year ago, the department proposed to charge for premium bulk trash [removal] , but we’ve had difficulty implementing this. We hope to eventually do that,” Kleine said.
An email to Raymond regarding the city’s plans for charging for bulk trash pickup has yet to be answered.
City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young was exasperated at the news and said the impact of the service cut would be dire for a city where many neighborhoods are already drowning in bulk trash.
He was quick to make a connection between reduced bulk trash service and more residents dumping illegally.
“We’re going to have Illegal dumping everywhere,” he said. “We already have that now. This is not going to sit well.”
Kraft told Chow he needed to have a “conversation” with Kleine about the city’s cleaning priorities and said to the Council, “We need to reconsider that service.”