City Trying to Take the Headache Out of Holiday Trash Pickups

At the end of every year, confusion reigns on the curbs of Wauwatosa. Residents' regular habits of putting out the trash are interrupted just when they're piling up more garbage than at any other time.

Suddenly, with mountains of refuse to move out, instead of once-a-week stops on a set day, you get only two pickups in three weeks, and they fall on some odd Tuesday or Thursday - instead of your usual Friday or Monday.

If Director Bill Porter has his way, that won't happen this season. He is determined to keep the city refuse collection on its regular schedule, and he's found a way to make it happen – at a slight cost.

Because Christmas and New Year's Day fall on Sundays this year, Porter saw an opportunity to keep to the normal weekday schedule – if he could persuade city refuse workers to come in and drive their routes on what would have been days off for them.

"Could we ask the collectors to work on their holidays?" Porter said. "We asked for volunteers, and we got them."

The carrot was time-and-a-half pay for eight hours but with the opportunity to go home to their families as soon as they finish their routes, even if it isn't a full shift. The additional cost to the city for eight employees working shifts on four additional days, Porter calculates, is $11,219. He said it would be paid out of a surplus in the Public Works budget.

Six of seven members of the city's Budget and Finance Committee agreed it was worth the money to avoid the hassles of off-kilter trash collection. Only Ald.Brian Ewerdt dissented, voting against the plan because he thought, in part, that the cost was too high and also because the city had already published its usual arcane holiday collection schedule, potentially confusing people even more.

But the majority thought it all well worth the price, both for citizens' peace of mind and their own. Ald. Dennis McBride said he would hardly miss the calls from upset constituents wanting him to tell them when to put out their trash or why it wasn't picked up.

Porter has been on the job less than a year and so hasn't seen the frustration and mess firsthand, but he's heard the stories about mounds of garbage piling up around carts and spilling off curbs as people put out waste too early or too late. Showing that he's become quickly attuned to the Tosa penchant for tidiness and order, Porter became concerned about the civic aesthetics of irregular trash collection.

"You're building in confusion," he said. "There will be standardized collection this year."

As for next year and subsequent years, things are a bit up in the air. The calendar changes, of course, and the city is , changing the game.

But Bill Porter has a year to figure that out.