BURBANK : Residents Report Trash Pickup Glitch

Automated trucks are picking up garbage on Burbank city streets, but now some of those streets are not automatically getting clean.

“I was not aware that this was going to be a major problem,” Public Works Director Ora Lampman said. “It was my understanding that problem was already well taken care of.”

Burbank began phasing in automated trash pickup at the end of April. One-third of the city is now included in the program, and the entire city will have automated pickup by September, 1994.

The issue was raised in a Burbank City Council meeting this week by a couple of residents complaining that trash cans left in the streets were forcing street sweepers into the middle of the road.

“It’s a legitimate complaint,” Lampman said.

A couple of weeks ago drivers of the automated trucks were told to make sure that trash cans were returned to the grass parkways where they had been picked up, Lampman said. Some of those cans are still not being returned. But part of the problem is that the trucks’ hydraulic arms cannot put the cans on a parkway if a car is parked in the way, Lampman said.

Traffic engineers, street sweepers and garbage collection employees have been assigned to find a solution to the problem, Lampman said.

Another part of the problem is caused by a conflict between garbage collection schedules and regulations requiring parking on alternate sides of the street on certain days. Lampman said the least acceptable solution would be to change the parking schedule.

Instead, a better alternative would be to reschedule street sweeping days as well as to enforce the order for employees to return trash cans to the parkways.

In the automated trash pickup program, one truck picks up garbage for 700 homes in a day rather than 200 in the conventional manner.