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Trash trucks end By John Briggs Free Press Staff Writer Downtown residents won't be shaken out of bed at 4:30 a.m. anymore by the beeping and grinding and banging of trash trucks. The Public Works Commission voted Wednesday evening to move the starting time for trash pickups to 7 a.m., with exceptions for certain difficult pickups that will be decided case by case over the next month. Former Third Ward Councilor Doug Dunbebin, who lives in an apartment on Church Street, and Thomas DeSisto, a University of Vermont graduate student who lives on Main Street across from City Hall Park, were exultant after the meeting at the Public Works building. The two are members of the newly formed Downtown Neighborhood Association. "Finally," Dunbebin said, "we're being treated like everyone else in the city." Trash pickups in non-commercial zones of the city begin at 7 a.m. Several trash haulers attended the meeting for the annual renewal of their city licenses, and they argued that they needed early starting times downtown to get their big Dumpster-emptying trucks into the narrow alleyways before parked cars, traffic and other vendors jam the streets. "If we don't get started early, we don't get it picked up," said Leo Gauthier of Gauthier Trucking, a 53-year veteran of trash hauling in Burlington. "The streets get blocked and you just can't get it if you start late." Serge Dupuis, the operations manager of All Cycle Waste, said early work downtown was safer than work after 7 a.m. because of the difficulty of backing a front-loading truck into traffic on narrow downtown streets. "Everything's tight," he said. Dunbebin estimated that 400 to 600 people live downtown. James Barrett, chairman of the Public Works Commission, urged that any exceptions to the 7 a.m. starting time be kept to a minimum. Contact John Briggs at 660-1863 or jbriggs@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com |