Delays in sweeping autumn leaves disappointing
Autumn leaves piling up in Palmerston North gutters have caught the city council unprepared to sweep them up.
City councillors’ phones are running hot with people calling to complain about the lack of sweeping, just as they did this time last year.
“History is repeating itself,” Cr Vaughan Dennison told a city council economic growth committee reviewing progress on road maintenance work.
“It’s autumn and we have not planned for it again.”
Acting group manager for transport and development Bryce Hosking said the budget for kerb sweeping and sump cleaning was essentially all spent.
Apart from a list of priority streets with a large number of deciduous trees, such as Elmira Ave, contractors were only responding to complaints from residents about leaf buildup.
“This was an area of considerable underfunding for the levels of service we were expecting,” Hosking said.
He said the budget had been insufficient for three years, and more money was being recommended to be put aside through the draft long-term plan, currently out for consultation.
Meantime, the council was looking at how it could provide some “surge capacity” within its own resources to respond to this season’s peak in demand.
Mayor Grant Smith said that when the council used to do street sweeping itself, it had two trucks dedicated to the work, but contractors Fulton Hogan had only one.
He said it was clear that Fulton Hogan had not been well set up to carry out street sweeping to the standards residents and the council expected.
Smith said the service was “really average”, and he did not think it was reasonable to expect residents to know that they had to call and ask for their streets to be swept.
Cr Billy Meehan said the council needed to communicate better with residents, to let them know there was not capacity to sweep every street, and that they had to complain if they wanted action.