Lug your recycling and trash to the corner two days a week?

As some may know, Media Borough recently contracted with a new recycling vendor, J.P. Mascaro and Sons last April. The new vendor was a significant savings over the previous vendor.

Apparently, J.P. Mascaro is willing to pick up the recycling on the same schedule as the previous vendor, but has requested Borough Council to service the entire town on a single day instead of the current two days a week. The day they requested was Wednesday.

At this month’s working meeting, Borough Council President Pete Alyanakian took a straw poll from borough council members asking whether they would support switching to a single day or keeping it at two days of pickup.

Apparently they requested public comment and received seven responses from residents, so either no one heard about it, or it wasn’t well advertised. The responses were relatively ambivalent.

Currently, according to the borough web site, the following schedule is in effect:

• Monday: East side trash pickup
• Tuesday: West side trash pickup and recycling pickup
• Wednesday: Bulk trash pickup last Wednesday of the month
• Thursday: East side trash pickup and recycling pickup
• Friday: West side trash pickup

That said, the results of the straw poll at the working meeting fell across the “New Coalition” lines with:

• Jim Cunningham, Dawn Roe, and Monika Rehoric choosing to move recycling to a single day for the entire town
• Peter Williamson, Monica Simpson, and Eric Stein choosing to keep the existing schedule

After the straw poll, Pete Alyanakian voiced that he would then be the deciding vote to change the schedule or not. From previous statements, it seems as if he is in favor of changing it.

Peter Williamson stated that he would prefer to keep the schedule as is in order to increase leverage with the vendor when it came time to renegotiate the contract. In short, don’t play your cards before it’s time to start negotiating.

Why should I care?

Switching recycling to a single day of the week means residents of Media will have to take recycling and garbage to the curb two nights a week instead of one. For East side residents, it would be Wednesday and then Thursday. For West side residents, it would be Tuesday then Wednesday, with an extra trash pickup on the other day when needed.

I don’t know about other residents, but personally, I take my trash and recycling out one night a week. If I have excess trash, I use the second day of the week to do that pickup, but most weeks, it’s one day of work in the evening to put the trash and recycling out. Adding another day of the week for recycling will mean I spend two nights a week dragging things to and from the curb.

The facts here are:

• Borough Council is not obligated to change the dates, at all, contractually
• Changing from two days a week to one is a negotiation point when the contract is renewed
• Changing from 2 days a week to 1 day a week inconveniences all 6000 Media residents, while
• Leaving the pickup at 2 days a week inconveniences the handful of employees of J.P. Mascaro who agreed to the schedule

So, the question is: Why change it?

From the looks of things, it may be changed to a single night this Thursday at the Borough Council legislative meeting at 7:30 PM at the Media Borough Government center.

If you care about the number of nights you need to drag trash and recycling to the corner, it’d be a good time to voice your opinion.