Icy roads led to trash pickup trouble.
Adel Hakki knows what to expect.
He has lived in Santa Fe for 11 years, so he's used to city services getting paralyzed by snow. But while clogged streets are no surprise, the city's trash pickup woes in light of recent storms are a new development.
"I haven't seen it quite like this in 11 years," Hakki says. "The trash hasn't been as big of a problem as the roads,
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but my guess is that the two are related."
Good guess. While city crews have worked around the clock to clear the streets and pick up trash, the problems in both areas are inextricably linked.
The massive storms that hit New Mexico over the holidays created criticism of the city's response to clearing city roads [Outtakes, Jan. 3: "
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"There were some roads we just could not access with a 50,000-pound garbage truck," Bill DeGrande, Solid Waste Division director, says. "I'd say 30 percent of all the routes we collected over the last two weeks we did with four-wheel-drive pickups."
The problems were exacerbated by plowed snow blocking access to garbage and miscommunication about trash pickup times.
"There was some confusion in the publicity that accompanied the storms," DeGrande says. "We work every holiday, so we weren't on a delay, but a lot of people didn't put their refuse out that first Monday [Jan. 1]; they thought we were going to pick it up on Tuesday, and that just put us behind forever."
As a result, city councilors have received several complaints about trash pickup days and even weeks after the last storm hit.
City Councilor Chris Calvert says that while the situation is virtually back to normal, some residents missed a few cycles of trash pickup because their streets remained too difficult to navigate.
"Next time, we need to clear the snow before it turns into ice," Calvert says. "The sooner we can clear the roads, the sooner we can have trash delivery."
DeGrande says his department is back to its regular trash pickup schedule and should be caught up on neglected streets by the end of the week.
"I think everybody was caught by surprise, and I think we all learned some very difficult lessons," DeGrande says. "I think it was problematic for everyone across all the departments, and I'm hoping what comes out of this is a really good snow plan for the city that encompasses all departments."
