A Leaf Falls in Western Springs—And Then What?

Western Springs wouldn't be Western Springs without its trees: lush, green foliage lining our streets and accenting our parks. Come autumn, however, that does present a certain problem.

"We are Tree City USA," said Bill Nelson, Western Springs Director of Municipal Services. "We enjoy all the benefits that trees give us, but obviously, this time of year, it gets to be very expensive [for individuals] to dispose of [leaves.]"

Or, rather, it would get expensive. In Western Springs, it's free, thanks to the village's well-developed leaf-collection program. For two months, the Public Works department devotes a full 80 percent of their resources to purging the streets of fallen leaves, hitting the streets as early at 5:30 a.m. with a bevy of specialized equipment and working straight to sunset.

Leaves do not magically evaporate from the gutters of the village. Their removal is a service with a history of experimentation that has developed into a well-greased machine—if one that still encounters the occasional frustration

Leaf bales? Suction hose?

There are seemingly as many ways to dispose of leaves as there are leaves to dispose of, and the Public Works Department has tried just about every one.

Once, workers used a giant hose to suck leaves into a garbage truck. But the flying debris would snag in and damage the fan, which was designed to suck up wet material, not the loose leaves. At another point, the Department would use a small pusher vehicle to shove leaves into a collection device. Like the hose, this was painfully time-consuming.

The Department even considered using balers to bundle the leaves, an approach once taken by La Grange Park. While this did work, it didn't get the streets particularly clean—and, again, it just took too long.

Through these various experiments, a system has been hammered out that Nelson calls "one of the best"—seamless enough that he and Municipal Services Analyst Matthew Supert can mostly let it run its course.

"Leaf season, for the most part, kind of runs itself, because Public Works has been doing it for so long," said Supert. "Bill and I don't do a lot of hands on—the public works department knows exactly what they need to do."

How your leaves disappear

As most villagers know, all houses in Western Springs are expected to sweep their leaves into the street gutter—with the exception of residents of Ogden Avenue and parts of Wolf Road, who sweep to the edge of the gutter, and residents of Timber Trails and Commonwealth, who have their own removal services.

The first man on the scene on any given day is Greg Gates of Brookfield, who is up at 4:00 a.m. and starts work at 5:30, in a customized "pusher" with a street-sweeping attachment. His job is to turn the scattered leaves in the gutters into neat little piles, and he remains mostly separate from the rest of the crew.

If Gates, a former truck driver, has the loneliest job on the leaf crew, he also has one of the cushiest. "When it's raining outside, and the other guys are out there raking and stuff, I'm nice and dry, and I have the radio on," Gates said cheerfully. (His station of choice: AM talk radio, "unless they've got a stupid subject on," in which case it's 97.1.)

A four- or five-man team follows Gates' work, with three open-top dump trucks, an end-loader with a "clam-bucket" attachment and an optional sweeper. The trucks park, and their drivers get out with rakes while the clam-bucket closes on the leaf pile like a hungry maw, before lifting the leaves above a truck and dumping them in. The rakes tidy up the remainder of the pile, and the process repeats. Three "bites" later, the pile is gone, with the sweeper taking care of any remaining debris.

At the end of the day, all leaves are driven south to Country Landscape and Supply in Lemont, where they are "agronomically" applied as fertilizer to a 135-acre farm. This is the final fate of 5500 cubic yards of Western Springs leaves a year.

Monotony and frustration

Normally, during the year, a Public Works worker has a different job every day—fixing a water main, paving a street or doing maintenance on a vehicle. In leaf season, all that changes.

"It's kind of the same thing every day: pile, dump—pick up a pile, pick up a pile, pick up a pile," said Gary Paleczny, who typically runs the sweeper. The benefit: a fatter overtime check, which Paleczny half-jokingly referred to as "blood money."

Boring-but-the-pay-is-good is a theme among the workers in leaf season. "We're three weeks into it, and it's starting to get a little old, but it's nice to have the overtime," echoed Gates. "It's monotonous, [but] it fills the day up."

Another theme: frustration with residents who don't follow the rules. Leaf pickup is leaf pickup only—no branches, pumpkins, flower pots, bricks or animal corpses (yes, the workers say they have found animal corpses) in the gutters. The end-loader doesn't know the difference, but Country Landscape and Supply does, and it's the Public Works Department who has to field the angry calls.

"Some people think that the program is for the disposal of all organic waste," Nelson said empathetically. "It's not true. It's just for leaves." (The village will pick up branches after storms or high winds—but those need to be left on the curb, not in the gutter.)

Other things that annoy the Department workers include residents sweeping leaves into the street a half-hour after they've cleaned, and—this especially—cars perpetually parked in the street on top of leaves. "People… park too close to a pile of leaves, and I can't get to them," said Gates. "That's my biggest obstacle."

"A lot of times, we're going around the same car every time, and then we get a call that 'hey, you haven't picked up my leaves in the weeks,'" said Paleczny. "Well, the car's there every day, we're not going to be able to!"

But despite these minor annoyances, let it never be said that these men don't do their job well. They are moving through the village at a record pace this year.

Take it or leave it?

Nelson admits that there has occasionally been talk of eliminating the leaf program in Western Springs. "As towns get into budget crunches, it's always something that's thrown out there, 'what if we get rid of the leaf program,'" Nelson said. "But there's a commitment in the Village with our elected officials to [providing] this benefit to our citizens."

Nelson estimated that eliminating the program would save the village only $45,000 per year, and that it actually saves citizens more money on removal than it costs them. ""It's certainly going to cost residents more in the aggregate to dispose of those leaves on a bag by bag basis," Nelson said.

"It's cost-saving for the residents," agreed Jeff Birks, the Village's Superintendent of Public Works. "We'd have to pick [leaves] out of the street anyways—they're going to get in the street—but this way there's a program where they're in the street at a certain time. We keep the inlets clean—it helps in many more ways than one."

So don't expect the Western Springs leaf-removal program to go anywhere anytime soon. It might be time-consuming, monotonous and even surprisingly dangerous—last year, disaster was nearly averted when a truck-full of leaves caught fire. But the system is effective, and the Public Works Department will continue keeping the village streets as clear of leaves as possible.

At least until mid-December. That, of course, is when they'll switch to clearing snow.