More than a few complaints were made when the city told nearly 9,000 Dallas residents that they would have to move trash pickup from their alleys to their curbs on March 1. However, recent successes in the Peninsula and Highland Meadows neighborhoods have shown that if residents are willing to put in the effort to reinstate their alley service, the city is willing to work with them.
Now even more residents, including many in Lakewood, are collaborating with the city to return to alley service. According to Alex Winslow, president of the Lakewood Neighborhood Association, approximately 2,000 homes in Lakewood had to switch to curbside pickup, and many of them want to resume alley pickup. Winslow says Lakewood’s plan was always to let the Peninsula neighbors work out a formula with the city before tackling the issue themselves.
“What we’re doing is following the lead of Peninsula now that they’ve blazed the trail,” he says.
Mary Nix, director of the city’s sanitation department, says the process to resume alley pickup will be much the same in Lakewood and any other neighborhood as it was in the Peninsula Neighborhood and Highland Meadows: First, neighborhoods will be required to gather together and decide how they want to divide up, which is entirely up to them. In a meeting with Lakewood residents, Nix suggested dividing up by sections of three blocks or fewer, depending on how the trash route runs. Then, instead of the city sending out ballots like it did in the Peninsula Neighborhood’s case, the residents must get at least 75.1 percent of their section’s homeowners to sign a petition, and submit it to the city. Lakewood residents are currently working on this.
“It seems to organize them better if they want to do it that way,” Nix says.
Once petitions are turned in, they will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to make sure a return to alley service would make sense from an efficiency standpoint. If it does, a city representative will come out and inspect the alleys and tell residents what, if anything, can be done to make the alleys workable. Once the city is satisfied that all requirements have been met, alley service will be resumed.
Nix says it’s not possible to predict a timeline for this process because it is dependent on how fast residents are able to get the work done. “I think some of them are extraordinarily motivated, and they’ll get it done really quickly,” she says.
Winslow says the Lakewood Neighborhood Association is helping to organize homeowners, but each individual section of Lakewood will set its own timelines.
—Elizabeth Elliott
