Medford trash pickup change a national ‘laughingstock’

Medford s plan to cut trash collection in half is generating a stench that has turned the Greater Boston city into a national laughingstock according to city councilors who are rebutting the mayor s claim that they approved the rollback Turmoil has erupted after Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn and other bureaucrats stated that the city is prepared to implement biweekly waste collection in July with the rollback surfacing in national and international headlines after the Herald first disclosed on the plan Comedian Seth Meyers has even picked up on the argument The mayor of Medford Massachusetts of late informed a new waste removal campaign which will reduce trash pickups to once every two weeks but it s Massachusetts Meyers declared Tuesday on his late-night show on NBC so bottle recycling is still every day Lungo-Koehn is responding to the uproar On Wednesday afternoon the mayor posted a video on social media looking to calm selected fears and various anger over a trash contract that institutes the biweekly trash pickup a move she mentioned the city s solid waste task force recommended in Lungo-Koehn then claimed that agents publicly presented the contract before the City Council approved it in July The contract we signed does have us collecting trash every other week the mayor explained but not until July So that s over months away with plenty of time for us to talk about it and make adjustments City Council President Zac Bears and Councilor Justin Tseng swiftly responded to the mayor s video arguing that the council never approved a specific contract but rather authorized Lungo-Koehn to enter into one I m also disappointed by the Mayor s continued attempts to pass the buck and point fingers at the City Council to shift blame for this decision Bears stated in a social media post To be clear only the Mayor has the legal authority to change program In a separate post Tseng vowed that he remains committed to a Medford that tackles state change with the area not as a laughingstock on national TV The councilor added that the council s vote in July was required by state procurement law allowing the Mayor to negotiate a -year waste contract As our official meeting record states Tseng wrote this was not a vote on any specific contract and the Council first learned of the administration s final decision at the same time a large number of of you did through paragraph of a press release The City Council and residents are taking exception to how Lungo-Koehn and administrators formally publicized the scale-back from the current weekly trash collection Administrators issued a press release on Nov highlighting how the city secured a grant from the state Department of Environmental Protection to endorsement its so-called zero waste initiatives The release covered how the grant is the second that the state DEP has issued to the city to purchase curbside organics collection carts In the state helped launch Medford s residential compost collection initiative with an initial award We were deciding how to be transparent about this and hadn t discussed this since publicly Lungo-Koehn explained in her video So although I wished to do it sooner than later we presumably should have separated it from the release that went out with the good news about the grant I do take responsibility for that Under the new provision residential -gallon trash carts will be collected every other week along with recycling at no charge beginning in July Administrators say the baseline will equate to gallons per household per week Residents could continue to lease additional -gallon trash and -gallon recycling carts That arrangement volume representatives say meets the state s criteria for the DEP s Pay As You Throw project making the city eligible for the grants Moving to a biweekly collection would save the city over million per year at a time when disposal costs are rising executives have stressed The city has scheduled neighborhood meetings in December and January to discuss the plan Whether you think this change is a bad idea no matter what or potentially has various merits Bears the City Council president mentioned the fact that Medford s trash removal approach has gotten so much negative attention in national and local news and was joked about on national broadcast TV is a colossal communications failure and undermines the trust of residents Trash and recycling bins line the curb in Medford as the city debates a proposal to scale back collection services Libby O Neill Boston Herald