East End towns turn new leaf on fall foliage pickup

Holding up a 30-gallon paper bag, Riverhead Highway Superintendent George Woodson said the receptacle could become the wave of the future in his town. As long as he can get people to fill it with leaves.

"We're going to start a pilot program . . . we want to give 10 bags to every homeowner," Woodson said.

Leaves are a big problem in Riverhead, where highway crews still go down every residential street with a big vacuum truck and pick up the piles at the curb.

But, when it rains, the leaves flow down the street and into storm drains, which clog. Woodson said some drains have not been cleaned out for a decade or more - far longer than he has been highway superintendent.

There are changes being planned in leaf collection in other towns on the East End, too. This year in Southampton, highway crews are being instructed not to pick up leaves that are in plastic bags.

The town used to take those bags of leaves for composting, but no one seems to want compost with lots of shredded plastic in it, Highway Superintendent Alex Gregor said.

In East Hampton, a more draconian change is being proposed. The town is talking about stopping leaf collection entirely - just letting homeowners or their landscapers bring leaves to the town's compost center on their own.

A public hearing on the East Hampton plan has been scheduled for Thursday at 7 p.m. in town hall. Officials in that cash-strapped town say they will save $450,000 by stopping the leaf pickup, and will likely get another $125,000 by selling off their leaf collection equipment.

Pete Harris, Southold's highway superintendent, has been picking up leaves in paper bags for four years. He said they last for weeks, even if rained on, and making people bag their leaves allows him to clear the streets in a third of the time it used to take.

Woodson, who wants to start his experiment with paper bags in a few weeks, said the practice of vacuuming up leaves not only adds to the problem of clogged drainage systems, but keeps his crews from doing any other work.

It takes several people to operate the vacuum truck and other heavy equipment to pick up leaf piles. And, because the vacuum truck cannot compress leaves, it takes more trips to cover the same homes, versus picking up bags that are pressed together.

Town Councilman John Dunleavy, a retired police officer, had another reason for wanting people to bag their leaves. He said he spent 20 years responding to car accidents after it rained in the fall. "People would say they slipped on the wet leaves," he said.