City's new leaf vaccum trucks worked well; saved about $57,000 in labor costs while providing extended season

This week's snowstorm brought an abrupt end to the city's new, extended leaf pickup season that featured a new fleet of leaf vacuum trucks.

City officials, who in recent years had talked about scrapping the entire leaf pickup service, said Thursday that most residents liked the leaf pickup program using the new trucks.

“I know from kudos we've had communitywide,” Mark Jones, the city's solid waste/recycling superintendent, said Thursday. Residents have told him, the drivers running the trucks and the City Council, “It's a great service, this is wonderful,” Jones said.

He said the new trucks allowed the city to more effectively clean up leaves, to extend the pickup from four to 10 weeks and to send trucks by homes weekly and not just a couple times during the pickup effort.

City officials also estimate that the new vacuum trucks saved the city $57,000 in labor costs over previous years when the city used end loaders and dump trucks over a few weeks to scoop up leaves raked into the street.

This fall, vacuum trucks worked from early October through this week's snow on a schedule that for the most part had a truck come by each home weekly on garbage-pickup day. The trucks got a little behind schedule at the peak of the pickup program.

This year, too, residents kept leaves in their yards at the curb, which meant many fewer leaves clogging city sewers and many fewer leaves washed into waterways to decay and sap oxygen in the process from aquatic life.

The city's Jones said the $57,000 savings takes into account both labor and equipment costs from previous leaf pickups.

In 2009, for instance, Jones said his department budgeted $130,000 in labor costs and $130,000 in equipment costs for leaf pickup, which was money the department transferred to the city's Streets Department for use of its employees and its end loaders, dump trucks and water trucks.

This year, some overtime at peak times and the hiring of 10 temporary workers - who worked on city garbage routes while front-line solid-waste employees ran the single-operator vacuum trucks - cost the city about $73,000 in labor costs, a savings of about $57,000 from last year, Jones said. There was no payment to borrow Streets Department equipment.

Some 38,500 city households also are paying an additional $3 a year to help pay off the fleet of 10 new vacuum trucks, which cost $133,500 each, over about a seven-year period, Jones has said.

City crews now will perform maintenance on the trucks, which likely will sit idle until next fall.

“They did a lot of work,” Jones said of the vacuum trucks.

Jones had established a 10-week schedule, “weather permitting,” which would have ended the leaf pickup today, Dec. 11. The work ended three days early because of the snow.

“We were pretty much on the money,” he said of the schedule's forecast of the city's first snow.