Despite an outcry of protests, village trustees decided 5-2 that we all must now bag leaves in the fall. It’s an emergency! Though one trustee recommended letting voters weigh in on the issue via a referendum, the board decided leaf collection was a crisis that needed urgent intervention. Leaves in the street are a great peril, they say, and bagging leaves or just letting them lie where they fall is much safer and more sustainable.
I’m not convinced. We have too many leaves (a lot of them from village trees planted in the parkways, I might add) to just “leave” them and expect them to compost over one winter. Every spring I rake up leaves that blew into my yard after my last raking in the fall. They didn’t decompose.
This seems like a fake solution to me. Before instituting what the village considers to be a sustainability measure, it should have conducted a local demonstration project in a public venue, to prove that its “leave the leaves to compost” strategy actually works. Leave all the leaves on the ground, for example, in the fall in all the village parks so we all can see how beautiful the park grounds look in the spring.
Bagging leaves is more sustainable? Did I miss the village’s analysis of how many bags will be needed each year and how many trees will have to be cut down to make those bags?
(Note to self: Small plastic shopping bags are bad; giant paper yard waste bags are good.)
Safety issues, such as car fires and children getting hurt, could have been addressed by quicker pickup times, repositioning piles away from intersections, expanded community education, and other thoughtful measures. In a public awareness campaign, remind people not to park their cars on leaves. Remind parents that they must supervise young children and teach them not to play in the street. No one wants to see children get hurt, and to suggest that people who oppose leaf bagging have an “appalling” lack of concern for children is also … appalling.
(Note to self: Leaves in the streets are dangerous, adding more and more bike lanes is not.)
Instead of tweaking a system that has worked well for 30+ years, the village has completely overhauled the leaf-collection system, pushing the labor and cost onto residents. It is reducing one of the basic services that we look to local government to perform. Instead of taking pride in providing a greater level of leaf collection service than many other communities do, Oak Park is using the lower bar of other communities to justify doing less.
Local government should strive to make life easier for residents, not harder.
All the leaf bags sold for use in Oak Park should come with the names of those trustees who voted for leaf bagging printed in large letters on them. Come fall, when we’re breaking our backs to stuff leaves into thousands of bags, we should remember who we have to thank for this wonderful new exercise: Susan Buchanan, Chibuike Enyia, Lucía Robinson, Brian D. Straw, and Cory J. Wesley.
Mark Wallace is a resident of Oak Park.
