The Pensacola City Council ended a little-used program that offered free curbside pickup of cardboard boxes for city residents over the objection of Mayor D.C. Reeves.
With the repeal, residents who used the service will have to pay $15 a month or opt into the city’s $8 a month curbside recycling program.
Councilman Charles Bare sponsored the proposal to repeal the ordinance that created the program. He said he learned that the city offered free curbside pickup of flattened cardboard boxes after boxes from his neighbor’s yard were blown all over his yard.
The Council voted on April 23 to repeal the ordinance 4-3, with council members Allison Patton, Teniadé Broughton and Casey Jones voting against the appeal. The vote was the second and final vote required to repeal the ordinance. The first vote occurred at the April 9 meeting and passed 6-0.
When the first vote occurred on April 9, Sanitation Department Director Darryl Singleton said the program was made before an era of Amazon boxes flooding residential neighborhoods, and it was “often abused.” The department receives only about 35 calls per month under the program.
Singleton added that the cardboard was only recycled if it was clean enough to be recycled, and often it is not.
However, at the April 23 meeting, Singleton clarified that the level of pickup is not a hardship for the Sanitation Department, as call-in pickups are scheduled in areas once there is enough that builds up for it to make sense to send a truck. It can mean people have to wait a few weeks after they call for the service.
Singleton said sometimes people will say they have a large pile of cardboard when it’s just one large TV box.
“I don’t want to go and make a trip for one TV box, so we’ll try to wait and pick up to where we know we got some, I don’t want to use the word legitimate, but some real bulk items to pick up,” Singleont said.
Reeves and Bare spar over cardboard ordinance
However, Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves, who was not at the April 9 meeting, came out against the repeal during his press conference on April 21. When it came up at the April 23 meeting, Reeves said he opposed it because it wasn’t a decision being made with data, and the residents who did use the service would suddenly have to pay $15 for each pickup.
“I’m a more data-driven person, and somebody having something blow into my yard doesn’t, to me, constitute allowing an additional expense on top of the taxpayer,” Reeves said. “And again, if I have a dog relieve itself in my yard, I’m not going to ban Golden Retrievers in the city. I just think we have to think a little bit bigger and a little bit larger.”
Jones, who was also absent from the April 9 meeting, said his constituents who were upset about the Summit Boulevard recycling drop-off closing were excited to learn the city offered the program, and he would have spoken against the repeal.
Bare said he was surprised by Reeves’ opposition and that while it’s a little-used program now, if the city started promoting it, more residents would opt out of curbside recycling, and the problems that losing cardboard would cause in neighborhoods would grow.
“Why would I even have recycling if I could just put my cardboard on the curb, let it blow all over the place, and call sanitation, say, ‘Come collect it?” Bare said. “And that’s pretty much what we’re doing right now. And what this gentleman was told, who lives across the street from me, was that, well, maybe just put a rock on it or something.”
The city’s recycling program collects more than cardboard and includes cans, paper, and plastic bottles, tubs and jugs.
Bare said his neighbor’s cardboard sat outside for two weeks, and it was dirty and wet when it was collected, so it likely wasn’t recycled.
“I was trying to solve a problem, and I thought things were fine until the mayor got on the radio and kind of made it sound like I just had a feud with my neighbor,” Bare said. “And the fact is, the only reason it came from my neighbor is because I didn’t know it existed. You had a pile of cardboard that kept blowing away. And I’m like, can you do that? I didn’t think you could do this. So that’s how I found out about it.”
Reeves said prior to the vote that if the repeal passed, he wanted it to be clear to the public and the 30 households a month that use the service that it was the Council’s decision.
“If you don’t want this to be a service to the citizens, and you want to charge more for it, that is absolutely your right,” Reeves said. “And I am not stamping on that. I’m going to separate myself from raising people’s rates in this city on a frivolous thing, because something happened with your neighbor.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola ends free cardboard pickup over Mayor D.C. Reeves objections
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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