City Council

Salem City Council Committee on Government services November 16, 2022 Purpose: Meeting with engineer to discuss trash, pick up street sweeping issue of leader litter on city streets. Attendance: C. Cohen, C. McClain, C. Varela, C. Prosniewski, C. Hapworth, C. Watson-Felt David Knowlton: Talk A little bit this morning just about some things that are happening with trash pickup and then even though the subject of equity. but those basic things were working through right now and if we have any questions, we go to about 7 o’clock with council questions and testimony and 730. we will allow Wanted to make sure that we talked about tonight and we did have a conversation about it as well, so I broke it down into four categories was trash the sweeping schedule and so I’ve got some information. I can share the answer to any questions you may have. There are some things that are not necessarily all in engineering. There’s some collaboration that we do with the board of health related to private enforcement, but we worked together well, but there’s always improvement that we make for sure with trash pickup so we have about 240 trash barrels throughout the city park downtown all over the place in the B5 district for kind of reference we have about 52 barrels and that’s the normal season. We use cardboard, barrels, and extra barrels to keep up with the trash barrels so 240 barrels represents about 22% of the barrels in the city district under 10% in the area barrels in the area we empty twice the end of the winter time spring and fall Monday through Wednesday we had another pick up on Thursday and Friday and then on Saturday and Sunday. we go to four times so there’s a lot of effort that we put into the barrels is also picked up when we’re there to empty the barrels our day is spent in the area we focus on the point area, the splash pad part that there on Lafayette Park and then we do go to Palmer Cove typically once a week we spend a couple hours there after park overall we do see a lot of illegal dumping, which would mean trash going in the barrels and only confound the problem with litter because that household trash bags of the barrels, I’ll talk a little bit, but I think it’s important to see the compliance with no parking when we do sweeping is really important if we can get the cars out of the way it makes so much more efficient sweeping exercise when we blow the sidewalk into the street and then sweep up. The point is obviously a densely populated area and litter compliance and using, you know, appropriately sizing the dumpsters and making sure the covers are closed on the private dumpsters is a challenge. You know, it's an enforcement issue and that's where the Board of Health comes in. We kind of work together with them. When our waste reduction coordinator goes out and does inspections early in the morning, she makes notes and I think you know, now it's Janelle Rolke who is in that position. She just started a couple of months ago. So, she's getting her feet wet and really starting to get out into the neighborhoods and understanding that. But again, it's kind of difficult to enforce. You know, if people don't see the consequences of littering, then they think, you know, well, somebody else is going to pick it up. So, it's kind of a mindset that I think we need to change there. We did try a pilot back in 2020 of picking up trash twice a week in the Point neighborhood. It was a pilot for about a month's time, and it was done a pickup on Tuesday and on Friday from August to September 14th. And we only saw about half of the residents or the buildings in that neighborhood put bins out twice each week. You know, a lot of times we just saw the same one bin, or the bins out on a single day. So, a lot of people didn't take advantage of it. We did see a slight uptick in the amount of trash that we picked up during that pilot, but we didn't see the reduction in litter that we were hoping to see. So, we did it for about a month and we just said, it's not going to work, and we got to kind of shift gears. And I think the focus on the private dumpsters and enforcement and the kind of public relations, public communications to the neighborhood are probably the way to go. And out of that meeting, the next steps was a more collaborative effort with our Waste Reduction Coordinator and the Board of Health on enforcement, inspect the other issues, the material is there we have a meeting back in 2020 with the neighborhood association to talk about litter then mandatory recycling coordinator role talked about resulting from overfilling from issue behavior. things they want to throw unfortunately, and litter can also always be present in the neighborhood, and I think it’s kind of a mindset if you see a lot of litter on the street don’t think about the process that the people in the neighborhood. Chair: One that may be an easier one or a quicker one to sort of get through right now is the question, because the point we can talk about and we will talk about for sure, there's a lot of issues there and a lot of things we want to discuss there, but just trash pickup in general. One of the questions that we've taken pretty frequently has been about fees for trash pickup. So just for those listening at home, the question frequently is homeowners don't pay a fee for trash pickup, landlords do. Those fees inevitably, even if it's only a few dollars, those fees are passed on to the rents. So, there's an issue of equity that we wonder about and wonder why that even exists in there. So, you and I talked about that a little bit today, if you wanted to sort of just talk through that. David Knowlton: - Focus on assessing and possibly revising the fee structure for trash pickup to ensure it's fair and equitable across all city residents, including homeowners and renters. - Consider transitioning solid waste management to a fully funded enterprise account similar to water and sewer services to eliminate the need for subsidy. - Enhance outreach and public education efforts on proper trash disposal and recycling, potentially including door-to-door engagement and the distribution of informative materials in multiple languages. - Explore innovative solutions to manage litter, such as increasing the number of public trash bins and experimenting with their placement to influence disposal behavior positively. - Conduct a detailed study on the sources of litter within neighborhoods to inform targeted interventions, considering factors like unsecured commercial dumpsters and public trash receptacle overflow. - Improve the frequency and coverage of trash pickup services in areas identified as high- use or problematic, especially on weekends and in parks, to prevent overflow issues. - Utilize existing experiences and issues raised by city councilors as case studies for developing broader, city-wide strategies for waste management and litter reduction. C. Watson-Felt: - Explore the necessity of additional litter and recycling barrels in downtown areas, especially at high-traffic points like the corner of Church and Washington. - Review current data collection methods on litter accumulation to ensure they accurately reflect community needs. - Consider instructing residents not to pick up litter temporarily to assess the true volume of waste and justify new bin placements. - Discuss the integration of new bin requests into the municipal budget, considering both the financial and operational implications. - Clarify the number of existing recycling barrels as separate from the general waste barrels, specifically within the B5 zone. - Evaluate the potential for a pilot program in densely trafficked areas, such as around the bricks during peak tourist seasons, to gauge the effectiveness of additional bins. - Define the procedural steps for community members to request additional bins and how such requests are evaluated and implemented. David Knowlton: - Acknowledge the limitations of the current waste management tracking process. - Highlight the reliance on both quantitative data (like material weight) and qualitative input (Janelle's observations and feedback from residents). - Illustrate the attempt to correlate waste volume with specific collection areas, albeit imprecisely. - Note the inclusion of personal experience from a now-counselor regarding past interactions with the waste management system as a resident, emphasizing the system's openness to resident feedback Chair: This could remain in committee. There is more work to be done on this. There could potentially be changes to ordinances and there’s more conversations to have about this, so we can leave this to the committee. David Knowlton: - Schedule street sweeping post-winter, avoiding trash collection days and holidays. - Begin street sweeping with entrance corridors, then proceed to neighborhood sweeps. - Utilize early morning hours for entrance corridor sweeps to clear sidewalks and streets. - Allocate a month for neighborhood sweeping, focusing solely on street cleanliness to accommodate labor limitations. - Increase cleaning frequency in the point area and downtown during summer and fall, including sidewalk clearing in the point area. - Consider night schedules for downtown sweeping to reduce disruptions. - Adjust fall sweeping schedules to later in the season for more effective leaf collection, using tandem sweepers for increased volume. - Post-fall sweeping, evaluate the efficiency of the adjusted sweeping timetable and decide on its future application. C Cohen: I believe this should stay in committee, but I think out of our conversation tonight, I think that the health department should be brought into this, into the fold of this conversation. I think there's a direct correlation with problem areas with rodents. And I think that the trash and the rodent and pest control go hand in hand. So, I think this is a much bigger conversation. So, I would advise the chair if we could possibly recommend Mr. Greenbaum to come to entertain us about what they're doing about pest control. With that, I'd like to make a motion to keep them, for this to remain on the committee. Motion: Councilor Varela makes a motion to leave this in committee. Seconded by Councilor McClain. All in favor? All opposed? So that's four or five councilors, including myself, voting yes. Do we have another motion? I'll make a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn by Councilor McClain. All in favor? All opposed? We're adjourned.