WESTFIELD – With Christmas in the rearview, city residents are busy removing their ornaments and depositing their balsam or fraser firs on the sidewalk for city workers to whisk away.
As 2014 turns into 2015 and with the city moving to a new single stream recycling program, Westfield’s Department of Public Works is in the process of figuring out when they will be collecting the city’s Christmas trees.
“Typically we’ll collect them and take them down to the DPW yard and chip them up,” said DPW Director Casey Berube. “Right now we’re working on the logistics of that, as a lot of the guys I’d have doing (Christmas tree) pickup are going to be tied up with the single stream transition.”
Berube remarked that inspecting and marking the barrels for single stream is going to be a tall order for the start of the new year, adding that January 19 has been discussed as the potential date for the city to clean up Christmas trees.
“We have had folks out there collecting them as they encounter them,” he said, guessing that six to eight workers are typically devoted to collecting Christmas trees.
Berube stated that there is a reduced capacity in the DPW yard for trees this year, due to the influx of single stream barrels and cobblestones that are being devoted to the city’s gaslight project.
“Real estate’s kind of tight, so we’re looking at alternate locations for storing these until we get the chipper up there,” he said.
While he couldn’t estimate the number of trees the DPW typically handles a winter, Berube stated that the Twist Street transfer station where residents can usually take their trees to be discarded, is also a much busier place this year than it was last Christmas.
“I need to work with the Health Department on that, as they’ve got the solar project going on up there, so we’ve got some real estate issues there,” he said. “But once we get our location set, if people want to just drop them off down here, that’s fine, too.”
In the event that a snowstorm were to hit the Whip City before DPW could collect the trees, Berube said that a city ordinance requires residents to remove the trees from a snowbank.
“Digging out a bunch of frozen trees is more manpower than we can commit to,” he said.
In Southwick, residents can bring Christmas trees to the transfer station.
DPW Director Randy Brown said there is no particular time period for disposing of trees.
“”Residents can bring brush all throughout the year,” said Brown.
