Long Beach City Council Tables Trash Code Reform

LONG BEACH, NY — The Long Beach City Council tabled a proposal Tuesday that would overhaul the city code governing trash disposal at bars and restaurants.

Under the proposal, businesses would have to put their trash in cans or dumpsters instead of leaving it outside in bags, which city officials said at the meeting has become an issue.

“There’s been a lot of complaints around businesses, etc., around town,” City Manager Dan Creighton said. “This is a quality of life issue, and the updates would mandate that commercial food service establishments dispose of their refuse in trash cans instead of bags, and requires the same establishments to arrange for correction every day that they operate.”

Creighton called the trash changes “common sense,” and said that the department of sanitation in the city had been seeking the changes “for years.”

Giving the council pause Tuesday night were the logistics surrounding implementation of the trash plan, particularly in the west end of the city. The number of trash cans needed to store all the trash, city officials said, could become an eyesore.

Sanitation superintendent Devin Parker called the trash reform “the next step of keeping [the city] clean.”

“No business in town needs 30 garbage cans. The most you may need is eight to ten, at the most,” Parker said. “This helps keep the town clean. We pick up morning and night…so, you wouldn’t have 30 [trash] bags piling up, we’d pick it up twice a day, morning and night.”

As for the logistical questions the council had raised regarding trash can storage, Parker said there were bigger fish to fry for the city’s sanitation needs.

“We’re worried about storage of the cans, that’s the least of the problems. You don’t want rodents,” Parker said. “You should be worried about keeping the town clean, that’s it…no business in town needs 30 cans, more than 15…you don’t have that much garbage.”

“The good thing we have going for us is we have great sanitation people,” Councilman Chris Fiumara said.

After public hearing concluded, the city council agreed to table the proposal until a future meeting.