In response to the City of Whitefish’s newly signed contract with Republic Services to provide individual, bear-resistant trash containers and service them on the streets, residents penned 52 letters of opposition and several spoke out against the change at a recent meeting of the Whitefish City Council.

The change involves replacing the shared, 300-gallon containers currently in use with individual, 90-gallon trash containers that residents will have to put out on the street in front of their homes on trash pickup day. While most of the respondents agreed with the need for animal-resistant trash containers, the outcry centered on the need to move the individual containers to the street for service rather than have the trash pickup occur in the alleyway.

Among the concerns is the difficulty many senior citizens and other residents will have moving the 90-gallon containers to the street each week. Many people, especially those who live in “The Avenues” section of town, stated that they do not have a path from the back to the front of their homes and that their neighborhood was built to utilize the alleyways for garbage pick up.

“This is a very specific area, if you look at where the public comment came from, they’re from The Avenues where we have the alleys. A lot of Whitefish doesn’t have alleys,” City Manager Dana Smith said. “So we can look at implementing elsewhere first and then work at how we will manage these other neighborhoods.”

During public comment at the council’s May 16 meeting, Paul McCann said, “In our neighborhood, the trash pick up is in the alley, and now it's going to be moved to the street. My first question is, why? Why does it have to be in the street? I think half the houses in my neighborhood do not have driveways.”

Other complaints centered on the narrow streets that are crowded with cars and, for much of the year, those streets and boulevards are covered with berms of snow that will make transporting the bins difficult.

In addition to the burden of moving the containers, residents were concerned about the appearance of their neighborhood. Many wrote that the trash bins could be on the streets and in front yards for potentially long periods of time, thus diminishing the beauty and value of their homes.

John Ellis, another resident of the avenues area, agreed with McCann about the lack of driveways in their neighborhood and the problem the new pickup location presents.

“It’s hard for us to roll them through the grass during the summer and harder to roll them through the snow in the winter,” Ellis said. “We’re not going to roll them through the snow in the winter. They’re gonna sit in our front yards all winter long.”

Smith said as soon as the city saw the influx of letters regarding the changes in garbage services, she reached out to Republic Services and learned they are amenable to looking at how to shift the curbside services to alley services for certain neighborhoods.

“It might be a time when we look at making our alleys one-way,” Smith said. “Enforcing our right-of-way in an alley might be something that has to come up and that is a challenge because we do have a lot of individuals that store stuff into our alleys sometimes or park into our alleys.

“We have to recognize that is a right-of-way that is used for these types of services and it makes sense for a lot of these neighborhoods that have it,” she added.

Councilor Ben Davis said he wants Republic Services to realize this is an item of significant concern and hopes they can work with the city to find a solution for those affected citizens.

“I don't know that I fully appreciated how difficult (moving trash containers) might be for certain citizens,” Davis said.