True rumor
Source: clipart-library.com To me, the original for this seem as if it were genuinely old. But I got it, presumably without copyright restrictions, from that source. If this is new, kudos to the creator for the look of it.
Fairfax County Department of Public Works and Environmental Services (DPWES) employees recommended discontinuing fall vacuum leaf pickup.
A trusted friend sent me the snippet below, from this Fairfax County web page, regarding fall leaf vacuuming by Fairfax County, emphasis mine:
Vacuum leaf service will continue to be provided through the upcoming 2023-2024 season; however, County staff are proposing to discontinue service permanently after this winter. The Board of Supervisors will decide the future of the service at a public hearing to be scheduled later this fall.
This isn’t a done deal. This is a staff proposal. There’s going to be a public hearing, and I’d guess the Board of Supervisors has to vote on it.
If you want to know more, read the after-action report (.pdf).
Fairfax County DPWES fall vacuum leaf pickup, described.
I think I learned a few things from their after-action report:
Fairfax County vacuums up fall leaves for about five percent of Fairfax County residents. Maybe 60,000 houses. Those are neighborhoods located in defined leaf-collection districts. Rake your leaves to the curb, and they’ll do the rest.
And charges for it. Properties in those districts are assessed an additional leaf collection fee, as part of their real estate taxes. The current assessment is $0.012 per $100 of assessed real estate value. So if you own a million-dollar mansion, here in Fairfax County, you’d pay $120 extra a year, for the privilege of County-provided vacuum leaf disposal, at your disposal. Assuming I didn’t slip a decimal.
Last year, Fairfax County had a bad year. The details are in the after-action report (.pdf).
Fairfax County DPWES then gave the whole vacuum-leaf service a good looking-over, and decided that it just wasn’t worth it. To much cost, too much hassle, too much uncertainty.
And bad for the environment, to boot. FC DPWES focused on fossil fuels consumed. Which, obviously, trucking around tons of leaves, will.
To which I’ll add a second environmental argument to #leavetheleaves. Mass vacuuming/composting of fall leaf litter amounts to wholesale destruction of insect eggs and pupae, including those of butterflies (aw). This is rapidly becoming an environmental no-no.
Finally, and unrelated: How does one pronounce DPWES? I say it’s an initialism, dee pee dubya eee ess. It’s a couple of letters too long for that, but as a word, it comes out gibberish. So it’s initialism, not an acronym, until I hear an employee of it, say it.
My bent
To be clear, I agree with both of the main points that I took away from the FC DPWES document, cost (value) and environmental impact. Maybe not for the exact reasons they stated.
Value?
Once-upon-a-time, standard off-the-shelf lawn mowers didn’t mulch. Without that, you had no convenient way to get rid of more than a moderate amount of leaf-fall.
My wife recalls that leaf-burning was once the norm, in the fall, in her middle-class Virginia suburban neighborhood. Everybody had a trashcan-sized barrel, made of wire, in which they burned leaves. People liked the smell of burning leaves.
As I read current regulations in Fairfax County, it’s ixnay on the eaf-lay urn-bay. Leaf burning is “open burning”. As such, it requires a controlled burn permit from the Fire Marshal. And you can’t get one of those for less than five acres, recreational campfires (and other things) excepted.
As I read it, leaf burning on a suburban lot will not qualify. And I’m guessing that’s not an oversight.
At some point in the past, as leaf-burning was effectively banned as a fall leaf-disposal option, a town offering neighborhood leaf-vacuuming provided a needed service to most residents. Or at least, a service perceived by many to be needed.
Back in the modern world, almost every standard lawn mower is now a mulching mower. I’ve looked and it’s hard to find one that doesn’t mulch. A mulching mower will take care of the leaf litter on most suburban properties, just fine.
Most people who have a lawn, have a mower. They have to keep the grass mowed. With a mulching mower, chopping up the leaf litter, while mowing, isn’t that big a deal. With some exceptions, you can chop it finely enough that most leaves just disintegrate and disappear.
(Separately, to a degree, paid lawn services might in large part remove or destroy leaf litter, and so duplicate municipal leaf vacuum services. I know nothing about lawn service contracts.)
The upshot is that, in the modern world, a commonly-available alternative to taxpayer-financed vacuum leaf collection is to mow your lawn. The taxpayer-paid service — which requires moving the leaves to the curb — seems to provide little value added, for most residents who mow their own lawns.
Not everyone has that option, but many do. That point is, for many taxpayers that constitutes a pretty low-effort and low-marginal-cost alternative. This relatively-low-effort alternative limits or lowers the average value of the service, to the average taxpayer. Plausibly, for some, it might be less effort to mow the lawn, rather than rake or blow it.
The environment?
The FC DPWES after-action report focuses on the fossil fuels burned in collecting and trucking that much leaf tonnage. That’s a fair point, particularly if the leaf collection isn’t really necessary in the first place.
To which I’ll add a second environmental argument, that it’s better to #leavetheleaves. Mass vacuuming/composting of fall leaf litter amounts to wholesale destruction of insect eggs and pupae, including those of butterflies (aw). This is rapidly becoming an environmental no-no.
The best thing you can do for you local beneficial insects is to leave your leaves alone. Next best thing you can do is to rake them in a pile, and leave them to overwinter. Grind them locally if you must.
The worst option is trucking them away, followed by hot-composting. This sterilizes (pasteurizes) the leaves. (That pasteurization is pretty much the point of hot-composting.)
To be fair, you’d have to factor in more lawn-mowings, in a world without fall vacuum leaf pickup. But you’d also have to factor in less use of leaf blowers.
Vienna Vacuums!
We’ve had our own leaf-vacuuming issues here in the Town of Vienna. To it’s credit, the Town made some changes in its fall leaf vacuuming process. But there’s no public promise (or threat) or staff proposal to eliminate fall vacuum leaf collection.
Here are some similarities and differences in the TOV situation and the Fairfax County situation.
Fairfax County’s operation is about four time size of Vienna’s, and is more spread-out. Vienna has about 16,000 residents, the areas served by Fairfax contain about 60,000 or so, by my rough calculation.
Fairfax charges a price for vacuum leaf removal, Vienna’s is pre-paid. This, as I argue below, is a real problem, if your goal is to eliminate this service.
Fairfax had a separate fund for it, with good accounting of the total cost of leaf removal. Vienna, by contrast, could only separately account for incremental or marginal costs. Items like overtime pay for the Town DPW staff doing leaf removal.
Fairfax never delivered the resulting leaf mulch to your home. You could pick it up a the transfer station. Or at selected parks. Vienna, by contrast, offered free delivery to residents, in unlimited quantities. Vienna no longer does mulch delivery, following a study of costs, and the resulting Town Council action.
The Fairfax County average cost per person served is not hugely different from a recent estimate of Vienna’s total cost per capita. From what I can glean from the FC DPWES document, average cost was about $2.5M for 60K residents, while a fully-allocated cost estimate of the Town of Vienna was about $450K for 16K residents. That works out to about $40 per person served for Fairfax County, versus about $30 for Vienna. But noting that Vienna has a far more compact service area, which might mean fewer truck-miles of haulage.
In any case, that similar cost is no surprise. No matter who does it, it involves trucks, fuel, personnel, and some balky special-purpose equipment. All bought at something like the market rate. No special magic involved by either Fairfax or Vienna.
Beyond that, the biggest problem with the TOV is that they have no good place to grind and mulch the leaves. This is a big, noisy, industrial-scale operation, that frequently stinks. No matter where they put that, within the boundaries of the TOV, somebody objects. I believe the current location is the third they’ve tried. The last few decades, they located it in a location formerly referred to in Town documents as “Beulah Road Park”. Only recently did residents of that area get the Town to rethink how it goes about leaf collection, with an eye toward kicking out the leaf grinding and restoring Beulah Road Park, to be a park.
Why Fairfax can change, but Vienna cannot.
And why economists hate “free”. Among other reasons, once you give out something “for free”, it’s hard to take it back. Even if free is just a euphemism for prepaid.
Well, here in Vienna, it’s free. It’s prepaid in that it’s covered by general tax revenue. There’s no separate fee for it. It doesn’t matter whether you rake your leaves to the curb, keep your leaves in your own yard, or use a lawn service that … does what it does. Your taxes are the same, regardless.
By contrast, Fairfax County charges a clear and explicit price. You live in such a leaf collection district, you pay an additional tax on your house, and in return, Fairfax County vacuums up your leaves.
For both Vienna and Fairfax County: As long as you rake your leaves to the curb.
Now try to take this service away.
In Vienna, you’re taking away a service that appears to be free to any individual. There’s no obvious “fairness” in a decision to stop gathering those leaves. It’s a service that is currently covered by your taxes. If you drop that service, you aren’t going to see a reduction in your taxes, or notice an offsetting improvement in your other Town services.
In Fairfax County, by contrast, there’s a tradeoff. Current users will get lower taxes, in exchange for less service. Like it or not, there’s at least the appearance of some fair exchange there. They’ll no longer collect your neighborhood’s leaves, but you can see the resulting line-item reduction in your property tax bill. Albeit a small reduction.
The actual fall leaf vacuum service has roughly the same average cost, in either jurisdiction. But the fact that it’s “free”, here in Vienna, makes it far harder for Vienna to drop leaf vacuuming entirely. (Drop, I think, is the environmentally-preferred option.)
Finally, this distinction between what Vienna does (“it’s free!) and what Fairfax County does (it’s a separate tax) is mirrored by how they keep their accounts. Vienna has no separate accounting of total cost of leaf collection, and instead only kept track of additional items, such as overtime pay. They literally had no way to calculate the average cost of service, within their standard budgeting system. By contrast, in reading the FC DPWES report, I see that there’s a separate leaf collection fund balance on the Fairfax County books. This makes it a lot easier for them to know what their actual average cost of service is. And act on that.
