Judging from the rush of letters to the editor to the Journal’s Viewpoints section, Oak Park village trustees have hit a hot button in their support for shifting the plan for autumn leaf collection in the village.
For decades, villager homeowners have raked all their leaves and, true confessions, most of their fall garden cleanup vegetation, into the street in front of their houses. A fairly simple and satisfying process. In the dark of night, village employees would push all the leaves on a block into a ginormous pile at the corner. The village’s contracted waste hauler came along the next day and took them all away to a supersized composting site none of us have ever asked about or visited.
But concerns have grown in recent years that the leaves-in-the-street model creates a danger to drivers, clogs sewers, has, rarely, been a cause of vehicle fires. There is also a frustration that owners of multifamily buildings, who should be paying landscapers to haul their leaves, are piling leaves into the street, too.
The alternative being proposed, and one used in many towns, is to require homeowners to bag their leaves and then deposit them on parkways to be collected and hauled.
Change is hard. We get it. But change is coming to a village filled with a glorious urban forest. Leaves are going to fall. The question is what to do with them. We’d say this debate isn’t about leaves in the street vs. dozens of paper bags to be hauled off.
The best option is the most simple, least expensive, best for the environment solution. Leave the leaves where they fall. They will compost all by themselves. For the slightly more lawn obsessed but still environmentally aware, follow the advice of Trustee Susan Buchanan, and chop them to blazes with your last mow of the season and let the little leaf bits compost in place.
Problem solved.