- Next Mayor Will Face Tough Decisions to Solve Financial Mess
- Service Couldn’t Be Better, and at $200 a Ton It Should Be
- Big Changes Planned for Garbage Collection
- As the Election Looms, Candidates Skirt City’s Financial Crisis
- In Tough Times, Fire Department Untouched
- Outside of Chicago, Fire Departments Face Cuts
- Emanuel, Unions Square Off Over Work Rules
- City Payroll May Include a Few Too Many Bosses
- In High-Crime Areas, Still Too Few Police
- City Kicks Off Costly Project to Overhaul Water System
In the waning days of retiring Mayor Richard M. Daley‘s long tenure, his Streets and Sanitation Department is planning a radical change in its garbage collection system that many critics have long called for as a way to dramatically cut costs.
Less than two weeks before the election to succeed Daley, a spokesman for the administration told the Chicago News Cooperative on Friday that officials would begin implementing a new, grid-based waste pick-up system that would supplant the entrenched ward-by-ward approach in at least part of the city.
The move comes just months after the city’s inspector general — in a report that many aldermen panned — said the city could save more than $64 million in the first two years with the sort of grid system that virtually every other major U.S. city employs.
Streets and Sanitation spokesman Matt Smith said Friday that the decision followed a pilot grid-based collection program in an unspecified part of the city last year. The city already collects recyclables on a grid-based routes.
“Based on those efforts, we are planning to expand grid-based garbage collection to more areas this spring,” Smith said in an e-mail. “We believe expanding this effort to the whole city becomes even more important as ward boundaries are set to change later in the year, and re-configuring routes based on a grid instead of new ward boundaries just makes sense.”
Many aldermen have long defended refuse collection by ward, saying it allows for better customer service. But most other large cities place an emphasis on efficiency rather than political boundaries in designing their collection routes, often through the use of computer software and other sophisticated analysis.
Houston, for example, considers such factors as how to avoid left turns, which are slower and lead to more accidents than right turns, and the times each day when traffic builds around schools as students are let out, said Marina Joseph, a spokeswoman for the city’s Solid Waste Management Department.