A QUALITY OF LIFE ISSUE
Autumn mess: Leaf pickup, illegaldumping cleanup clash
STAMFORD — It looks like people live at the curbs.
Couches on sidewalks. Mattresses propped against speedlimit signs. Armchairs beside fire hydrants. Tables set on the strips of grass that run along the road.
In Springdale, an enormous antiquelooking chest of drawers was spotted in the middle of Tower Avenue.
It all illustrates a problem that perpetually plagues Stamford — illegal dumping. Last week Cove neighborhood advocate Deborah Billington took a short drive along the streets near her home and found 19 instances of it.
She called the city’s Office of Operations.
“A woman there told me the crews are busy with leaf collection, and some of the trucks are broken down, so all reports about illegal dumping are on hold,” Billington said. “Leaf collection takes just about all of November and December, so we’re talking about two months of stuff sitting on the sidewalk. People see that and say, ‘OK, let me put something there.’
“Before you know it, it’s out of control,” she added.
Arthur Augustyn, spokesman for Mayor David Martin, confirmed that leaf collection is the priority of the Highways Department this time of year.
“All staff in the department are dedicated to leaf pickup until it is done,” Augustyn said in an email.
But after Billington emailed Martin, members of his cabinet, city representatives, the Stamford Neighborhood Coalition and the Advocate on Monday, Operations Director Mark McGrath, who oversees the
Highways Department, had crews clean up the Cove on Tuesday.
“Recycling and Sanitation picked up the illegal dumping in that area using garbage trucks,” Augustyn said.
The administration does not know how much time crews spend collecting illegally dumped items from the streets or what it costs each year, Augustyn said, but it is a concern citywide.
It’s unclear whether the problem is getting worse.
“We don’t have reliable data from previous years to make an assessment on a trend,” Augustyn said.
Chief Citations Officer Frank Fedeli said illegal dumping is connected to tenant living. His job is to check out complaints and issue fines.
“Oftentimes it’s a rental property. The landlord might not know about it,” Fedeli said. “There was an incident on West Avenue where the owner said tenants trashed an apartment, put stuff on the curb and left. There was an incident in the Cove where the property manager had to deal with it.”
Fines are the responsibility of the property owner, Fedeli said. The penalty is $90 per occurrence for dumped material with a volume of less than 1 cubic foot, and $1,000 per occurrence for material that measures greater than 1 cubic foot, according to the code of ordinances.
“There have been cases where there was so much stuff on the sidewalk that pedestrians, usually schoolkids, had to walk in the street,” Fedeli said. “That’s an immediate safety hazard, so we give them 24 hours to remove it, and they usually do.”
Billington said many illegal dumping incidents involve rentals but landlords are culprits, too.
“There are a lot of houses that have been illegally converted into apartments. People live there for a little while then up and leave and the landlord puts their stuff on the curb,” Billington said. “If the city is going to allow all of this illegal housing, this is what happens.”
Cleanup of illegal dumping is a doubleedged sword, she said.
“The city, on one hand, wants to remove it. On the other hand, people put stuff at the curb because they know the city will come and pick it up — there’s no incentive to get rid of it themselves,” Billington said. “The cost of removal is being dispersed across all the taxpayers.”
Augustyn said McGrath, the operations director, is “finalizing a solution to repeated illegal dumping.”
Now the city relies on residents to report it, Augustyn said. Some people mount cameras on their homes to catch violators, he said.
Residents should report incidents to the city’s online complaint center, Fix It Stamford, he said. In this year’s third quarter, July 1 to Sept. 30, the city received about 200 complaints about illegal dumping, he said.
“So you could extrapolate we get roughly 800 a year,” Augustyn said. “But it may be more than that.”
During those months, 60 percent of the complaints were resolved within three days, he said, and 90 percent were resolved within seven days.
Anyone — tenant, landlord or homeowner — who wants to discard things must bring them to the Katrina Mygatt Recycling Center at 130 Magee Ave. or to the city’s scale house at 101 Harborview Ave., Augustyn said.
Billington said she will wait to see what plan McGrath devises.
“We need solutions. This is not working,” she said. “Certainly people are beginning to feel that the neighborhoods are not on the city’s radar anymore.”
In her email Billington told officials that illegal dumping is directly linked to quality of life.
“I know you would agree that no Stamford neighborhood should suffer this indignity,” she wrote.