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At Monday night's Board of Finance budget vote, Democratic board member Andrew Palo motioned to cut $250,000 from the town’s Public Works Department to reduce the cost of its leaf pickup program.
The motion was shot down by the board's Republican majority, 4-2.
Board chairwoman Elaine Hammers told The Times Tuesday morning that the motion lacked specificity and that’s why it was overruled.
“Leaf pickup is an expensive service and not necessarily a great idea, but people want it,” Hammers said. “When he said cut $250,000, he thought it would just be in salaries but, in reality, it would greatly reduce our equipment and that’s an important piece of the program…
“He just said make it work with less and that leads us to the obvious question, ‘is that what residents want?’ We don’t know the answer to that and that’s why we can’t just make a significant cut into a service like that without public input,” the chairwoman added.
She said the board will continue to look at ways to create savings for the leaf pickup program. For example, in Fairfield, public works employees bag residents’ leaves before hauling them.
“We don’t do it that way,” Hammers explained. “We can save money doing it like Fairfield but then we’re stopping the way we do it — the way residents here in Trumbull like it.”
That got The Times thinking: what do Trumbull residents think about the town's leaf pickup program?
Do they prefer the way it's currently done? Would they prefer to see a cut in funding and have the program switch to the bag-pickup method that's been implemented in Fairfield? Or would residents like to see the program removed altogether from future budgets?
The Times will announced the results of this poll on Monday, April 11. So spread the word!