Ted Johnston called the City of Ripon’s Large Item Pick-up Program an overall success.
That’s considering that it had just replaced the old Spring Clean-up program earlier this year.
“Over 442 hours of valuable staff time were saved with the implementation of the new program and over $6,500 was saved in refuse disposal fees,” said the Director of Public Works at Tuesday’s Ripon City Council meeting.
All this took place during that six-month time frame.
“We provided 16 collection dates with a total of 488 residents participating in the program,” said Johnston, who added that a total of 138,780 pounds of unwanted items were picked up.
That’s less than the 360,000 pounds of material collected in last year’s Spring Clean-up program.
In terms of staff, he said that those dedicated to the program clocked in about 208 hours as compared to 650 hours in the previous year’s Spring Clean-up program
Initially, Johnston noted that staff would be able to complete 25 pick-ups each day.
“Over time, we realized we could do more and eventually increased the number of pick-ups to 35 at the end of the program. The only issues encountered were related to scheduling – some residents were scheduled a month or more from when they called and at the end of the program there were a large number of residents calling to schedule a pick up and not enough slots were available,” he said.
In turn, the program was adjusted to accommodate residents. Included was the increased number of pick-ups in a day, from 25 to 35 while adding additional pick-up days in August and September.
Johnston said staff is planning next year to boost up the scheduling, going to four days per month with 35 site pickups per day in order to accommodate the demand.
Elected leaders said the change from the old Spring Clean-up program was necessary.
“We had people from everywhere coming into our town and dropping off their garbage,” Mayor Dean Uecker said.