Fairfield residents will have more chances to dispose of yard waste

FAIRFIELD – More changes are in store for Fairfield residents looking to dispose of their yard waste.

Fairfield Street Department Superintendent Joe Hird said he wants residents to know there will be more opportunities for them to get rid of yard waste next year than there have been the last few months since the compost site on South 20th Street closed in August.

The compost site was open for residents to drop off yard waste or take free mulch, but unfortunately the city could not stop the site from being abused by people who either dropped off items other than yard waste, or by contractors who dropped off whole trees.

To compensate for closing the compost site, the street department has been hosting yard waste drop-off days at its maintenance shed at 1002 W. Jefferson Ave., like it did Oct. 4-5. Hird said the department will host a few more of those this year on the first Friday and Saturday of November (Nov. 1-2) and December (Dec. 6-7).

Hird said he doesn’t foresee ever having a compost site where the public can dump yard waste anytime they want. He said the problems with the compost site proved that it will need to be manned when open. He also wants to begin offering city residents free mulch again, but he’s worried that if the mulch is placed where anyone can get it at any hour of the day, some people will treat the area as a dumping site, and he doesn’t want that.

It’s not clear if the city will go back to using the compost site on South 20th Street, continue taking yard waste at the maintenance shed on Jefferson Avenue, or try a third option. Hird said the problem with the compost site on South 20th is that he’d need to send an employee there to either sit in a truck or to construct a small building for them to work in.

Looking ahead to 2025, Hird said that the city will receive more students from the high school through a school-to-work program, and this should allow the street department to add more yard waste drop-off days.

The Union asked Hird why the city couldn’t police the compost site by installing a security camera, as opposed to having it manned. Hird said that’s a question he gets a lot, and said that it would be more work than it’s worth. He’d have to check the security camera’s footage every day to figure out when an act of illegal dumping occurred, and then hope that he can read the license plate or deduce the identity of a contractor based on their truck.

“Contractors don’t all have their names on the side of their truck, and the camera might not be able to see it,” he said. “People think a security camera is the go-to answer, but we’d be wasting money looking at video. It’s not a logical thing to do.”

Hird said there’s no alternative to manning the compost site when it’s open.

“And if we man it all the time, we’re not on the street,” he said. “We’re going to have to offset the cost. Money that we spend on the compost site is money that we’re not spending on the streets, but it’s coming out of my operating budget.”

Now that it has become apparent that the city must charge for providing yard waste removal, the Fairfield City Council has drafted an ordinance to establish yard waste tickets, which residents could purchase when they want to drop off yard waste. The price of a full pick-up load is $25, defined as an area 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. The cost of half a pick-up load would be $12.50. On Oct. 14, the council passed the second reading of the ordinance establishing those fees, and the third and final reading is set for the Oct. 28 meeting.

  Buy Photo

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com