“We keep running into people with a couple of compost buckets and knee-high leaves,” says landscaper Cory Benoit. “That’s not going to work.”
The city stopped sending out trucks to collect piles of leaves from the street four years ago. Homeowners were encouraged to start compost piles or pack leaves into bags or compost carts for collection. But by now, Benoit says, some “people are kinda done with that aspect of it.” Two years ago his company, Evergreen Lawn & Snow, began offering curbside pickup to its customers in Burns Park. Now he’s rolling it out citywide: for $99, his crews will suck up your leaves with a heavy-duty truck-mounted vacuum.
Benoit had about 150 customers for the service last year but says he’s ready to scale up: “We have two big [trucks] already. Depending on how many people we get, we’ll buy more.” Since a heavy-duty pickup mounted with a 100-hp Giant-Vac runs $60,000-$80,000, he’s offering discounts for early signup; he figures that with six trucks, he can hit every neighborhood in the city twice during the six-week collection period. He’s not worried that the city will get back into the business and undercut him, noting that the last effort to reinstate curbside pickup got only four votes at city council. For the forseeable future, he says “this is the closest we’re going to get.”
