Christmas Tree Pickup Mix-Up Fuels Debate on Privatization

The season may be long gone, but a holiday symbol lingers--the Christmas tree. In fact, lots of them, left moldering at curbsides by a private contractor the city agreed to pay $200,000 to pick up the Yuletide conifers.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday turned the tree pickup imbroglio into a referendum on the wisdom of privatizing city services. “If this was a pilot program for privatization, it fell flat on its face,” Councilman Nate Holden said.

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who has had longstanding ties to public-employee unions, also got in her licks. The situation created by the botched contract not only poses a “fire safety hazard, but also it looks like the dickens,” Goldberg said.

On a motion by Councilman Richard Alarcon, a dissatisfied council asked the city attorney to report back on the possibility of not paying the contractor.

For the past few weeks, lawmakers say, residents have been complaining that they cannot get their discarded Christmas trees picked up.

Gleefully watching this post-holiday mess unfold has been the Service Employees International Union, Local 347, which represents 750 city refuse truck drivers. Refuse collection long has been eyed by privatization champions as one area ripe for contracting out.

“This contract proves privatization doesn’t work and that its cost-savings estimates are illusory and misjudged,” concluded Julie Butcher, the business representative for Local 347.

In recent years--before the city’s automated trash pickup service was in place--the thousands of Christmas trees that sprouted at curbsides after the holidays were picked up by city crews on their regular rounds.

But automation has upset this tradition.

The trees cannot be put in the city’s new automated trucks unless they are first squashed into one of the special city-provided yard waste trash containers. Only these green containers and the black ones for regular garbage can be emptied by the hydraulic lifts into the trucks’ maws.

And getting the trees to fit into the yard waste containers can require quite a bit of hacking.

After Christmas, 1993, the city paid drivers overtime to sweep the city for trees left out by residents who might not have realized that city policy had changed.

After last Christmas, hoping to save money, the city decided to have a private contractor pick up such trees. Selected by competitive bidding to do the work was American Waste Industries, an East Los Angeles-based hauler.

From the start, there have been mistakes attributable to the growing pains of an untried program, says Judi Paules, American Waste’s marketing director.

An early problem was the city’s failure to adequately inform residents of their tree-disposal options: Put the trees in the green containers and have them picked up by city crews, take them to one of nine recycling centers, recycle them at home or leave them at curbside and have them picked up, by appointment, by American Waste.

It also turned out to be a mistake to have American Waste pick up trees by telephoned appointment. That sometimes meant the company would pick up one Christmas tree one day in a neighborhood, a second tree the next day, which was inefficient, Paules said.

As trees began to rot at curbside, the city finally directed American Waste to scrap the appointment routine and conduct block-by-block sweeps of the city for the aging trees.

Even after a major sweep last weekend, however, relatively few trees were found.

Although the company collected fewer than 2,500 trees in the sweep, Paules contends that anti-privatization forces have exaggerated the Christmas-tree problem.

“The unions see this as a threat,” she said. “We’re a small company, and we’ve worked our butts off to perform. This has not been an unsuccessful program, and we think the city has gained some insights on how it can be better handled in the future.”

Councilwoman Ruth Galanter also is not ready to say the experience with American Waste was a disaster. “The council jumped into this program without adequate thought and planning,” she said.

Drew Sones, assistant director of the city’s Sanitation Bureau, also has maintained that American Waste has met the terms of its city contract.

Meanwhile, Silver Lake resident Jerry Vode says his Christmas tree, the symbol of his happy holiday season, ended up a nuisance and an eyesore.

“My tree had been out at the curb since the first weekend after New Year’s,” he said, adding that he was unaware that he needed to phone to make an appointment to have his tree picked up.

Finally, the retired accountant hired someone to chop up his tree and mash its remains into his green refuse container. “It was picked up today,” he said Wednesday.