The Town of Vienna is in the process of re-thinking its strategy for fall collection and disposal of leaves. There will be a public hearing at 8 PM this Monday (March 21, 2022), at the Vienna Town Hall. You can find the background materials at this link on the Town of Vienna Granicus web page.
In this post, I will briefly summarize the facts of what the Town is considering. Then I’ll make a few points that I plan to bring up at that public hearing. These are, I hope, points that the Town may not hear from other sources.
What the Town is considering.
We already have a number of social media exchanges that are (of course) getting the facts wrong. Because, apparently, people are perfectly happy to gin up an email about a topic without first taking five minutes to do their homework.
In particular, I need to start with one key fact:
Source: Town of Vienna Leaf Mulch Public Hearing Staff presentation, which every interested citizen has the opportunity to download from this URL on the Town’s Granicus website by clicking this link, and maybe, just maybe, actually read. Edits in red are mine.
The Town of Vienna will continue leaf collection just as it does now. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. There is no option on the table that would end leaf collection. Continuing leaf collection is assumed under all the options being considered.
As the sun rises in the East, thus shall leaf collection continue. The unrelenting toil of the leaf vacuum ceaseth not, yea, even onto the end of time.
Anyway, all it takes is a glance at Town staff’s summary of this (available at this link) to see that vacuuming up the leaves is still part of the deal. As summarized in the graphic above.
And, really, the Town really has no choice but to pick up leaves. First, if they didn’t, the heavy fall leaf load in Tree City, Vienna VA would clog the storm sewers. Second, it would arguably be illegal for the Town to cease leaf pickup. The Town pointed to its ongoing street-sweeping operations in order to satisfy the letter of the law of the Chesapeake Bay Act, which requires governments in the Chesapeake Bay watershed take actions to reduce the flow of nutrients into the Bay. If they now stopped picking up leaves, my bet is that they would no longer be in compliance with the Chesapeake Bay Act.
The only thing that will change is what the Town does with the leaves. Like so:
A bit of long division, or, why I keep using quotes around the term “free”.
OK, now who’s up for a little word problem?
- Option 2 eliminates the “free” mulch, and saves $75,000.
- In FY 2021, the Town of Vienna delivered 602 loads of “free” mulch. (Source: NewGen report, page 7, available at this link.).
- So, what’s the average cost of a load of TOV mulch?
Hence the use of quotes.
Please note that these aren’t my numbers. These are the Town of Vienna’s numbers.
But here’s my spin. This is what economists term value-destroying production. The Town takes perfectly good raw materials — labor hours, fuel, machine wear-and-tear — converts them into low-valued mulch, which it then has to give away to get rid of it.
It’s our own version of the communist economics that was the downfall of the Soviet Union. Complete with using the large amount of demand for the “free” product as the justification for continuing to produce it.
I am sure that if the Town of Vienna merely charged its average cost for that mulch, almost all demand for it would cease.
How do I know that?
Well, first, we can look at Arlington County. They charge $50 for a load of their much (which is, by the way, tested and certified as to quality). And even at that extremely low rate, based on their budget documents, Arlington County delivers one-third the amount of mulch that Vienna does, per capita.
Second, we can check the price list at Remington Mulch. That $125 very nearly buys you two cubic yards of their high-quality leaf mulch, including the $75 delivery fee.
Free is a four-letter word.
To an economist, “free” is a four-letter word.
People will take anything that’s free, as long as they place some value on it that’s something greater than zero.
You will hear the argument that residents of the Town of Vienna really value that mulch.
But to an economist, that’s nonsense. Technically speaking, we have no idea what value residents place on that mulch, because we give it away. In truth, all we know is that some residents place a value greater than zero on it.
Economists believe in “revealed preference”. You can’t tell what value people place on some object by asking them to talk about it. The only way to know what people really value is to see what they’ll spend their money on. That’s how they reveal what they do and do not prefer, and what they do and do not value.
So, if the Town insists on keeping this inefficient small-scale mulch operation going, then it should charge its customers the $125 per load cost of production.
And then let’s see how valuable Town of Vienna residents think this mulch is.
In short, you can make arguments for government subsidy when there are public benefits. (An obvious example is vaccines for the current pandemic. They don’t merely provide a private benefit to the recipient, they provide a public benefit by reducing the spread of disease.) But mulch? That’s pretty much private consumption. And we don’t have a Communist government. (E.g., don’t confuse Vienna with the People’s Republic of Takoma Park.)
You bet your ass(et) on that.
There is at least one more point that bears mentioning, because it does not show up in any of the Town’s calculations.
Between the time the Town embarked on this mulch-covered path (in the early 1980s, I believe) and now, land prices in the Town of Vienna have skyrocketed. The little brick rambler that I first lived in sold for $80K in 1984. Those houses — or really, the lots those houses sit on — are going for $800K today. Inflation-adjusted, that’s a more-than-fourfold increase in the real price of land in the Town of Vienna over the interval.
More to the point, the Town has shown its willingness to purchase land in the Town of Vienna for somewhere around $2M per acre. That’s roughly the price paid for its most recent two purchase (the former Mayor’s house, and the former Baptist church).
At that valuation, the Beulah Road site is a $16M asset that the Town is effectively using as a dump. Surely there is some higher-valued use for that unique and expensive piece of land.
Only the third option — long-haul — fully frees up that land to allow it to be put to a better use.
Arguably, the Town couldn’t even buy a contiguous eight-acre tract today. Not unless one of the larger churches decides to relocate, or the Navy Federal Credit Union decides to up stakes.
But the good news is that the Town of Vienna can effectively obtain an eight-acre park site, just by choosing Option 3. So I like to think of Option 3 as not just saving $74,000 per year, but also freeing up a $16M asset that the Town can repurpose to some greater use.
Hands down, without a doubt, no two ways about it, it’s the best land bargain in the Town of Vienna. And it’s there for the taking.
Let’s put everyone in their shoes
I wrote up the back story some time ago, in Post #526. In a nutshell, a while back, the Town moved its extremely loud leaf grinding and storage operations into the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood. Before that change, Town documents had referred to that area as park land. Needless to say, the neighbors were surprised and upset to have, in effect, an industrial waste processing facility dumped into their back yards.
In the center of the picture above is the pad on which the Town does its leaf storage and grinding. Assuming Google Earth got the measurements right, the edge of that pad passes within 70′ of the property lines for the surrounding houses. That’s not literally in their back yards, but it’s pretty close to it.
So I’m going to take a leaf from the Town of Vienna’s book. The Town has proposed to change the process for requesting “traffic calming” measures such as speed humps. Under the new proposal, if you agree to have traffic calming on your street, you have to agree to allow it to be put directly in front of your property. Obviously, they aren’t going to put a speed hump in front of every house. But under the proposed change, the only way you can get that speed hump on your street is to agree that the Town has the right to put it in front of your house if they want to.
Taking a cue from that, I suggest that the Town change its mulch request form. In the future, if you request a load of free mulch, you must agree to give the Town the right to located its mulch-grinding operations in your back yard for a year.
I’m just saying that if you share in the benefits of “free” mulch, you should share in the drawbacks.
Let’s see how many mulch requests the Town gets then.
But what about the benefit to the environment?
First, to state the obvious, the most environmentally sound thing to do with your leaves is to keep them in your yard. That’s what I do. I “sheet compost” them on my garden. Which is a fancy way of saying that layer them on top of my garden and leave them to rot.
I believe — but cannot document — that the Town’s Environment and Sustainability Commission has said the same thing. But I could not track down where they said that. If they said that.
Second, again to state the obvious, your leaves are going to rot no matter where they end up. Those little wiggles you see on the Keeling curve? That’s all the leaves in the Northern Hemisphere growing in spring, and rotting in the fall and winter. That’s a force of nature, and your decision to compost or not won’t stop it.
Source: Scripps.
One way you can create a negative environmental impact from rotting leaves is to allow your hot compost pile to go anaerobic. That’s when your compost starts to stink, and that diverts some of the compost decomposition from C02 to methane. In the short run, methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than C02 is. (In the long run, it decomposes into C02.) Again, sheet composting in your yard absolutely avoids that. Hot composting risks it unless you turn the compost frequently.
And, of course, the final way in which composting leaves can produce environmental damage is via the fossil fuels required to truck them around, grind them, turn the compost pile over, and so on.
And there, grinding them and delivering the “free” mulch probably has an advantage. But it’s pretty small. This is my best guess for the total truck-miles driven, ignoring size of truck and any difference between city and highway mileage. (So this is a pretty crude cut).
Source: This is my rough calculation. This is not from the TOV.
As you can see, it looks like there will be fewer total truck miles driven under Option 1. But bear in mind that you have to feed both the leaf grinder, and a front-end loader to move the leaves around, and to re-load them into trucks for shipment to Loudoun. My take on it is that any differences in fossil fuel consumption among the options would be minimal, but reasonable people may disagree.
Finally, you may well argue that if the Town doesn’t delivery mulch, citizens will spend the fossil fuels to drive to the local big-box stores and buy it. And that’s true, but it also highlights how pernicious “free” mulch is. I’d bet that if you’re paying for mulch, and hauling it yourself, you aren’t going to be bringing tons of mulch into your yard every year, as has occurred with Town of Vienna “free” mulch.
Anything that’s free will be over-consumed, relative to its actual value. Mulch is no different. You may end up substituting some private-vehicle trips to the box box store for Town truck trips from the local compost pile. But I’d say the odds are overwhelming that that’s not going to be a one-to-one substitution, and that having to pay for and move the mulch yourself will result in a substantial reduction in the amount of mulch consumed here in town.
Conclusion
If it’s not obvious by now, I think Option 3 is the best choice.
That generates roughly the same savings as Option 2. But in addition, that completely eliminates the burden on the neighborhood around the Beulah Road property. And it liberates that 8-acre, $16M piece of land, so that the Town can put that to a better use.
Really, the only drawback I see is that people who were receiving their $125 mulch shipments, for free, are going to be irked at the loss of the free mulch.
My suggestion is to phase that out. Charge the estimated current average cost of $125 per load, and see how many takers you get. Then eliminate the Town’s production of it, and just buy one load of mulch for everybody who still wants one. That will be vastly cheaper than maintaining what would then be a truly residual mulching operation here in Vienna.
At some point, Vienna could do what Fairfax did for years, and leave mulch piles at some lightly-used areas of our parks. Citizens would be free to drive up and take what they wanted, first-come, first-served. That mulch could either be obtained via agreement with one of the local jurisdictions, or even just straight-up purchased in bulk.
Both of those suggestions are just a way to ease the blow as you wean the population off the existing “free” Town of Vienna mulch.
