Instead of simply raking leaves into the street in the fall, the village board now wants homeowners to work harder, back-breaking and sweating, bending and lifting, to pick up and bag all the fallen leaves in our yards and parkways. We’ve been raking leaves into the street ever since we bought our Oak Park home some 30 years ago. Suddenly, raking leaves into the street for Public Works and the garbage collector to pick up and haul away is “not working.”
Instead of trucks and plows doing all the heavy work, the village now wants individual homeowners to do the manual labor of picking up leaves and stuffing them into thousands and thousands of paper yard waste bags, standing them up one after another along our curbs like soldiers in formation.
Before the village board approves this burdensome measure, can it tell us how many thousands of yard waste bags in total Oak Park homeowners will have to buy to hold the 2,200 tons of leaves that fall each year? Can the village that taxes shoppers 10 cents a shopping bag (to reduce waste and encourage use of reusable bags) tell us the environmental impact of having to buy all of these additional yard waste bags? How many trees will have to be cut down every year to make the paper needed to make all these additional bags?
Will the trustees who vote for requiring bagging leaves also take a pledge at the same time to personally bag all the leaves on their own properties? No paying a landscaper extra to bag your leaves. If you’re going to impose this arduous extra labor on all of us homeowners who are too skint to hire professional landscapers, could you at least promise you’ll take your own medicine and bag all the leaves on your own properties? Lead by example.
Professional landscapers, by the way, should be pleased by this new proposal. All the extra labor of picking up leaves and filling bags will have more homeowners calling them for help. They’ll get more business, and be able to charge every client, old and new, bags of more money for all the extra work.
Chicago ousted a mayor for not shoveling snow off the streets one winter. Because of citizen outcry, the Cook County Board had to repeal a 1-cent/ounce soda tax just two months after the board imposed the tax. People like their streets cleaned. They like their soda. And this Oak Park homeowner, for one, likes not having to cram all the leaves that fall each year into hundreds of yard waste bags (way too many leaves to mulch and compost).
Voters like government to make their lives easier, not harder.
Mark Wallace
Oak Park