Williston Park is the only village in this area that doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what to do in the fall when the leaves begin to fall.
Our neighbors, namely Mineola and New Hyde Park, don’t seem to have this problem. They have timely pickups of leaves amassed at curbside on a weekly schedule, starting in November. They use a large vacuum pickup that also shreds the leaves as they enter the truck. Shredded leaves have an 8-to-1 ratio over loose leaves. This means that a truck load can cover more streets, and there will also be fewer trips to the dumps when the leaves are compacted, thus saving even more money.
The county trucks use the same method and pickup the remaining leaves on their streets; working in concert with Mineola and New Hyde Park villages, as well as others.
Now, lets see how Williston Park handles things.
First of all their doesn’t seem to be any set policy in Williston Park for leaf removal. Some years there was vacuum pickup, and some years there wasn’t. Some years the pickup started early, some years it didn’t, indeed you may have had only one or two pickups during the entire fall, even when things have gone right.
In any case, Williston Park had no vacuum pickup, and relied on outside contractors to do the job in the past. In years where the village did do it themselves they used the labor intensive method of pickup of loose leaves by a front loader, which in turn dumped them into an open truck bed. Costly and slow.
This year the village initially decided on street swipers. An unfortunate choice because swippers are not cut out to pick up heavy volumes of leaves and have a small capacity for handling loose leaves and are inclined to make a mess by spreading the leaves around the area. In addition they are of course slow and thus costly to run and again labor intensive to operate.
To make matters even worse they often come around on Saturdays (when they do come around at all) and on Saturdays we all know there are more cars parked on the street than a weekdays, making matters even more difficult.
If all this isn’t bad enough, the mayor announced that residents are now to bag the leaves themselves and place it out for collection. My guess is that the poor guys operating the swipers must have prevailed on him that this wasn’t the way to go. Whatever.
The average bag of leaves weights about 40 pounds when full; it takes each resident on an average of 15 to 18 bags to clear their property yearly.
Also the bags themselves are expensive. I can’t see senior citizens, handicapped residents and just plan tax paying residents hauling these heavy bags of leaves to the curb every week. My street is lined on both sides with stately oaks, 70 or more feet high. They shower the area with leaves well into January, and now that I think of it, aren’t they village trees on village property, shredding village leaves on village streets. Hmmm.
The village has a moral, if not a legal, responsibility to pick these leaves for as long as they fall and to do it every year on a timely basis. I expect this service, and indeed I demand it, as one of the reasons I chose to live here.
Most of the other villages have this system, why can’t we? I would suggest that during the summer the DPW acquire a vacuum retrieval system with shredder and be ready to go next winter. For the remainder of this season I would advise that the mayor hire a few local landscapers with shredder vacuums and have them get busy picking up the hundreds of curbside leaves that are all around the village and to keep it up through December.
Jimmy Bumstead
Williston Park
