There is no one living or visiting Trenton who could possibly say we are a clean city.   Facebook is awash with complaints about litter, illegal dumping and our general poor appearance.    It’s also safe to say that our trash strewn streets don’t win us any points with prospective residential or commercial buyers.

The sad thing about this problem is that our leaders don’t seem to understand it.  Rather than focus our limited resources on fixing the systemic problems that cause trash and litter to pile up, they react to the problem with “one-off” fixes.

Organizing litter clean-ups and reporting dumping are reactions to a symptom and do nothing to fix the underlying problems.

There are some easy and perhaps even free things we could be doing to fix our trash problem.  They break down as follows:

• Update the City website to provide correct and helpful trash removal information
• Communicate a coherent trash policy to landlords and renters during the Rental certification process
• Enable citizens to instigate sanitation “service requests” using the city’s existing ticketing system
• Give our sanitation department measureable goals

The following expands the general tactics above into specific suggestions for Education, Operations and Enforcement.

Education

There appear to be no publicly available guidelines for putting out residential trash.  Special pick-up and recycling explanations are jumbled on the city web site.  Citizens seem confused and have mis-information about trash pick-up.  We can’t expect citizens to do the right thing if we, as a city, won’t tell them what that is.

Suggestions

• Update City Web site for clarity and completeness.
  • This information should be separate from organization information about solid waste
  • This should be included on a page with links to similar citizen information on “How to work with the city”
• Publish plain language (English and Spanish) guidelines
  • Include the residential and commercial trash pick-up schedules (weekly and holiday)
  • Include guidelines for when to put out trash (after 7pm night before pick-up
  • Include guidelines on how to bag it (sturdy 33 gallon bags, tied)
  • Include any restrictions
  • Clearly distinguish between trash and bulk or yard items and provide instructions for all three
  • Clarify process for bulk pick-up of items
  • Include the citizen’s role in enforcement (below)
  • Include street sweeping schedules
• Communicate with residents
  • Publish articles on guidelines and enforcement in newspapers, social media and popular email distributions.
  • Develop a regular yearly pattern for communication
  • Allow Solid Waste employees to use email and computes to communicate with the public (apparently they don’t currently have Internet access or email)
  • Guidelines and Fine schedule along with other “how to work with the city” should be mailed or emailed if possible to landlords on renewal of their rental certificates
  • Homeowners should receive similar “how to work with the city” yearly via mail or email if possible (NOT via bulk phone)

Operation

Overall the operation other than communication doesn’t appear to be that bad. However, there are a few things that would go a long way towards improvement.

Suggestions

• Put public trash receptacle emptying on a 2 times per week schedule
• The inspector should perform regular spot checks to verify good trash pick-up procedures and that trash put-out guidelines are followed
  • The results should be published on the city web site regularly (quarterly)
• Give the Public Works Director and Solid Waste Division Head goals such as
  • Reduction in citizen complaints
  • Satisfactory regular spot checks
  • Employment reviews and any bonuses should include achievement of management objectives for these goals

Enforcement

It is not clear at all how enforcement is done in Trenton.  There appears to be no way on the city web site to report a trash issue.

Suggestions

• Include trash and dumping issues on a citizen “service request” ticking system
  • Tickets should allow posters to include photos, names, building owners tenants, dates of violation addresses etc.
  • Solid Waste should reply to ALL tickets with the disposition until the issues are resolved
  • Ticketing system should be included on the city web site with links from the Trash Pick-up page
  • Phone numbers to call for reporting problems needs to be communicated with other “How to Information on trash”
• Fines need to be clearer
  • Fine schedule should be published on web site and mailed to all building owners
  • Fines schedule should escalate for repeat offenders (this a tool for forcing sale of abandoned properties as well)
  • Fine history should be available for landlords to use in eviction proceedings
• Inspectors should focus their efforts on areas with history of previous violations and citizen complaints