The city of Oneonta has adjusted its brush and yard waste collection schedule and wants residents to know about the changes to avoid code violations.
The curbside residential brush and yard waste collection program runs from April to November. Residents should leave their brush and yard waste outside before 7 a.m. and no sooner than the weekend before the Monday of the week scheduled for collection.
While the amount of brush and yard waste left out in any given collection period could impact how quickly an area will be reached, every area is typically completed by Thursday, according to an informational flyer.
“What we’d like to do is, obviously, to work our way toward voluntary compliance with the schedule, so we don’t have a lot of bags sitting out in the intervening weeks, so we are not asking DPW to go out additional days and weeks when they are not scheduled to,” said City Administrator Greg Mattice during the Monday, April 27 Quality of Life and Infrastructure Committee meeting.
Department of Public Works Director Chris Yacobucci said Wednesday, April 29 that the city used to be split in half for collection, with half the city one week and the other the next week, once a month.
Mattice added Monday that throughout the past few business days, the city’s Code Enforcement Office drove through the city and identified a total of 50 violations of brush and yard waste piles left at the curb outside of the designated collection schedule.
He said if the city were to enforce these as code violations, which they are, officials could send a letter from the code office to these properties explaining the code and brush schedule, asking for compliance.
According to a copy of the letter, the correspondence would be “intended as an informational notice to clarify program requirements and outline expectations moving forward.” It stated that failure to comply with necessary requirements could cause the condition to be “deemed a nuisance or violation of city code.”
“We can take any approach you’d like, but this might be something that helps with voluntary compliance,” Mattice said. “No one likes to see bags sitting out for weeks at a time. It’ll get to be wet, it will get to be heavy.”
He added that this can cause potential injury to DPW employees. Yacobucci said if the bags are too heavy, employees will leave a sticker and not take the bag.
To ensure collection of brush and yard waste, residents must ensure the maximum diameter for brush is 3 inches and maximum lengths of limbs is 4 feet. The brush and bags of yard waste must be placed in the median between the sidewalk and curb. If there is no median, brush should be placed on the lawn next to the sidewalk.
Brush should be stacked in one pile away from any mailboxes, utility poles, hydrants and parked vehicles, the flyer stated. Bags of yard waste should be places next to the brush piles. Yard waste bags cannot weigh more than 50 pounds each and can only contain leaves, twigs, evergreen clippings, roots, stumps and plants. They cannot include any rocks, dirt, lumber, firewood, household trash or foreign objects. Any type of biodegradable yard waste bag can be used, but the city will not collect plastic bags.
In the event that a residents’ brush and yard waste was not collected before Thursday the week of collection and they put it outside before 7 a.m. that Monday, they can contact the Department of Public Works no later than the following Monday.
Residents also may bring brush and yard waste to the disposal site on Silas Lane on weekdays between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. by signing in and receiving the key to the dump site from the Central Garage office at 18 Silas Lane.
Scott Harrington, R-Sixth Ward, suggested putting out an educational notice in advance to make sure residents know the collection program was modified. Chairperson Elayne Mosher Campoli, D-First Ward, said the news had been sent out through Facebook and Nixle alerts already, with a reminder being pushed in the weeks prior to collection.
Not everybody is on Facebook or signed up to receive Nixle alerts, Harrington said. He said citywide mailer, like an informational postcard, could be a good idea, adding that the code enforcement letter would be a good next step if after receiving this notice, residents are still not complying.
Mattice said the city could send out the postcards and begin sending out the code letters following the May pickup. He said he could return to the committee to report the number of violators next month.