Champaign tries taking yard-waste collection in-house

Photo by: The News-Gazette

Champaign will take yard waste collection in-house for a trial period.

CHAMPAIGN City officials hope bringing yard waste pickup in-house will help them to provide better customer service to residents who use the program.

And if their cost estimates are right, they could save a bit of money by picking up residents' yard waste themselves, too. The service until now has been contracted out to private haulers.

City council members this week signed off on the one-year trial that will require the city to hire two temporary employees and rent a garbage truck. Beginning in October, they'll start making their rounds to pick up residents' leaves, branches and other fall yard waste.

It's a service that a lot of Champaign residents use, city officials said as they were considering the changes this summer. It started with a leaf collection and Christmas tree pickup in 1986 and evolved over time into today's program, for which the city has paid haulers to bring yard waste from residents' curbs to the landscape recycling center in Urbana.

"It is a program that they're very attuned to, and I think at this point have become very dependent on it," said public works operations manager Ernesto Salinas.

Except for one year when Illini Recycling won the bid, the contract has gone to what is now Republic Services for the past 13 years, according to city documents. Last year, the deal cost the city $166,900 for 14 weeks' worth of work in the spring and fall.

There have been service issues, though. City officials say complaints can get caught in an infinite loop between the contractor and the public works department and are not efficiently addressed. And the contract itself does not provide for much flexibility when bags are missed or the weather does not cooperate.

"It's always been difficult to predict the weather in the late fall and when the leaves will fall and when people will have a clear day to rake their yards," council member Tom Bruno said on Tuesday. "And it's caused disruption, and we've gotten less than great service from the private contractors to whom we have let out bids in the past."

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Champaign tries taking yard-waste collection in-house