Tim Loveday, Summit County solid waste supervisor, called recent garbage service problems a cascading series of events in which nothing went right.
“Anything that could go wrong and pretty much went wrong,” he said. “You know we were already, Republic Services was already falling behind around December 14. We got hit with some pretty significant snow and the snow really compounded things. It was unfortunate from the county's perspective that we let the landfill crews take holiday on Christmas and New Years for those two Mondays. That was known about a year in advance but unfortunately the timing of the storms did not help that situation at all.”
Scores of county residents reported weeks of delays in trash pickup during recent storms, along with trash cans buried or knocked over by beleaguered snow plow drivers.
Loveday told KPCW that Republic Services, the company in charge of picking up trash and recycling, is returning to a normal schedule now, though it’s not completely caught up yet. Addresses where recycling hasn’t been picked up yet will see that service resume on their next normally scheduled recycling pickup days.
Interim Summit County manager Janna young acknowledged the difficulties and said the county was trying to help out by providing dumpsters, free kitchen trash dumping at the landfill and launching a new website page called TrashDash.
“This will give real time updates by location to find out if there are delays or what the instructions are,” Young said. “It'll save them a lot of headaches from trying to call Republic or the county and it also eliminates some of the very long social media posts we were sending out.”