I am a citizen of Oak Park and have recently heard about the village board eliminating street leaf pickup. I would like to argue that is a bad decision. If they are trying to do it for the environment, what is worse, a truck picking up all the leaves or thousands of citizens buying bags, some percentage of which will be plastic. Some speak of trying to compost the leaves, but some people don’t have the space in their yard to compost all the leaves.
In Wednesday Journal, I saw an argument that we have a high percentage of elderly residents. Forcing them to bag leaves would be unreasonable for those citizens.
Another thing is that if the village is trying to decrease costs, it would cost more for citizens to buy bags for leaves than for one truck to pick them up. These costs, combined along with many others, outweigh the benefits of having the citizens bag the leaves themselves.
Ryan Farris
Oak Park
