My Leaves Are Gone

The town leaf pickup crew came by this morning and vacuumed the leaves from the curb. As I always do I started thinking about the cost of the service.

I noticed there was one truck, with a driver, one vacuum operator, three rakers and two supervisors in town pickups. 7 people working on a Saturday, presumably at time and a half. I also noticed it took the crew about 3-4 minutes per house to do my street.

Looking through the budget I see $14,200 for leaf pickup overtime and $19,000 for leaf pickup equipment repair overtime.

Based on an hourly wage of $13.75 I figure it costs us about $96 dollars an hour in labor during the week and $144 dollars an hour on the weekend. Assuming the 16,000 households which get trash service get leaf pickup as well I figure there must be about 900 hours of work with 85% of it occurring during the normal work week and the remaining 15% on Saturdays.  That works out to be about $73,440 in standard labor and $19,440 in overtime labor for a labor cost of $92,880 or a little bit less than $6 per household served.

Add to this the cost of the trucks, fuel and maintenance and I’d bet we are at $12 per household for leaf service with a single pickup.

Is this a good deal? Considering that the leaf pickup services that have sprung up in West Hartford and already existing in other towns cost between $25 and $50 for curbside pickup I’d say we are getting a pretty good deal.

Perhaps there is room for improvement however. Are two pickup driving supervisors (or any for that matter) really necessary? Can we cut the rakers back from 3 to 2? It appeared no more than two could efficiently direct the leaves to the vacuum anyway.

I noticed something looking through county tax bills from other states. It appears to be pretty common for the tax bills to be broken out so that the full range of costs that make up the total tax bill are shown instead of just the gross total. Perhaps it would be helpful to the taxpayers of East Hartford if we got a tax statement with our bill showing us what exactly we are paying for by general program. Leaf pickup, snow removal, road maintenance, schools, town government. There would be two benefits, first the citizenry would have a clearer understanding of where 11% of their gross income is going and second, our town officials would have a better handle on the real costs of the specific parts of town spending. I don’t believe any of these things are specifically broken out currently other than by budget account which doesn’t provide an accurate picture of the costs of each town service.