Town Changes Leaf Pick-Up Program Again

Once again, Southampton Town Highway Superintendent Alex Gregor has gone back to the drawing board to restructure the town’s leaf pickup program—and for starters, after this year, the town no longer plans to pick up any leaves.

An unusually brutal winter, coupled with a three-year hiring freeze, has left Mr. Gregor doing some serious thinking about how to reform the town’s leaf cleanup. Beginning next fall, highway trucks will no longer rumble down town roads to pick up leaves from nearly 40,000 homes. Instead, residents will be given the option of participating in a voucher system from November 1 to January 31, whereby they can drop off their leaves and brush for free at five town locations still to be determined. They will most likely be locations in the hamlets of Noyac, North Sea, Westhampton, Hampton Bays and Bridgehampton, he said.

“No more on the street,” Mr. Gregor said of the piles of leaves. “The party’s over. Everyone’s fed up with it. I’m fed up with it, too.”

Putting the brakes on the program is not a new idea. Mr. Gregor had been considering reforming the leaf program as early as June last year.

The progression of this year’s program has taught Mr. Gregor a lesson: that leaves can’t be picked up in a reasonable time frame because of the hiatus brought on by weather. This year’s program, which began in November, was halted for two months due to an intense series of snowstorms. It resumed in February, and town employees now expect that the entire town will be cleared of leaves in two weeks. Currently, crews are working west of the Shinnecock Canal, Mr. Gregor said. Properties on the east side of the canal have already been cleaned up.

The prolonged leaf pickup program distracts the department from other more traditional priorities like road maintenance and drain cleaning, he said. And trying to pick up the leaves earlier to beat the winter weather won’t work, he said. “You can’t call me up and tell me to shake the leaves out of your tree,” Mr. Gregor said.

Under the new program next fall, residents will be given vouchers to prove they’re town residents. At the drop-off locations, town employees will check for names, addresses and phone numbers to verify that the person is a town resident. Mr. Gregor said it doesn’t need to be the actual town resident who drops off the leaves—it just needs to be someone who would be able to verify the name, address and phone number of a town resident.

As a courtesy for residents 77 years old or older, town employees will still come by and pick up their leaves from curbside, he said.

The brush pickup program will remain intact next year, Mr. Gregor said, because that program is typically completed quickly, within a matter of four to five weeks in the spring, after the worst of the winter weather is over.

This year, highway workers cleaned up leaves in the eastern districts quickly, in part because Mr. Gregor said he found farmers who were willing to take the leaves and compost them. But the snowstorms halted everything.

“I found strategic spots in Bridgehampton, Noyac and Water Mill where I could bring the leaves,” he said. “That made a tremendous difference. But still, a month and three days into the fall program, we had 8 inches of snow, and then it snowed again, and then it snowed again, and then it snowed again.”

Part of the problem is that once it snows, that snow gets plowed around the piles of leaves, leading to narrower roads and unsafe traffic and pedestrian conditions, he said. And also, a lot of the times, the snow melts and the leaves get stuck decomposing in the drains, which clogs them up.

Members of some civic groups and town citizen advisory committees said they don’t blame Mr. Gregor or the town for the delayed leaf pick-up this year.

“I understand,” said Bruce King, president of the Hampton Bays Civic Association. “He got pushed back because of the snowstorms we had.”

Mr. King said the leaf pick-up program and its pending changes aren’t a big issue for his civic group, but said he could see some people in his community being upset about it.

Hank Beck, co-chair of the Citizens Advisory Committee-West, offered a balanced perspective. While he said he could see how the new program next year would free up some of the department’s time to accomplish some of “the non-sexy stuff,” like road repairs, he can see how some people without the means to haul their leaves to a drop-off location would view the change as burdensome.

“It comes back to, people will look at it as a tax,” he said. “I’m paying something now that I didn’t pay before for the service that I’m not getting. It’s a tax.”

Personally, Mr. Beck said he would probably have to arrange for a friend or someone else to help transfer his leaves to a drop-off location. “I haven’t got a pickup truck,” he said, laughing. “I have a lot of leaves. It’s not going to fit in my Volvo.”

Bonnie Goebert, co-chair of the Tuckahoe/Shinnecock/Southampton Citizens Advisory Committee, said she didn’t want to offer an opinion on behalf of her group. Personally, she said she’s always been satisfied with the town’s leaf pickup program.

“To give Alex due credit, I think he’s doing a heck of a job,” she said. “It was a horrible season. He’s at the mercy of the weather.”