Posted by
Bill Cherry on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 6:17:17 PM
You don't have to have ever been to Beverly Hills, California to know what its streets look like....exotic landscaping in every yard and teams of gardeners all but cutting every individual blade of grass to make certain the lawns and beds are pristine.
But the invention of the motorized blower removed the need for brooms, dustpans, and trips to the city's landfills. Gardeners blew the clippings into the streets and eventually the junk worked its way into the storm sewers. The city began spending thousands every year unstopping the sewers, stoppages that had been caused by the gardeners with blowers.
What to do? The moment city fathers gave the OK for the police to fine those caught misuing the blowers, various ethnic organizations cried foul. Surely this was a guise for the city to look for and harass aliens, since most of the gardeners were from Mexico and Asia. At least that's what they charged.
So the city decided to go at it another way. It would require all landscaping companies to become licensed, and they would be issued a procedures manual for how they must perform their tasks. One of the rules was that they had to have evidence of an agreement with an approved disposal site for their waste. Another was that blowers could only be used to corral clippings into piles which then had to be bagged and disposed properly.
Any company or its employee who was caught doing otherwise, was fined and more often than not, had their license suspended for a period of time.
Apparently this solved the problem.
Driving down the streets of Dallas not only shows yardmen blowing the results of the freshly cut lawn into the middle of the street, but even the cities landscaping crews doing the same thing. It's time for this problem to be properly addressed. Perhaps the Beverly Hills model should be considered.