B

The conservative assumption when seeing the acronym “B&B” is a nice vacation stay at a quaint establishment that serves a hearty breakfast.

Not so when it comes to the City of Morristown and its Public Works team.

Bulk and Brush pickup is a large part of the job description for the crew that faces the daily battle of tree limbs and large objects thrown (or nicely stacked) by the roadside throughout the city.

The crew, their equipment and a proposal to upgrade the procedure was discussed at the City Council’s Feb. 7 post meeting work session.

Public Works Director Paul Brown was tasked with leading the session and told Council members the process of Bulk and Brush pickup helps keep the city clean and provide a better environment for people to live in.

“We’d like to change it up a little bit,” Brown said. He explained there are currently 11 trucks and 14 trailers that make up the operation’s equipment.

Four of the trucks are straight-line: they are self-contained, they have a cab and chassis and have a claw mechanism that allows large objects to be picked up and deposited in the truck bed. Three are front-line, which means they are driven every day, according to Brown. One remains in reserve, to be pulled into duty should one of the front-line three need maintenance.

The other style of trucks are shuttles and loaders.

“The shuttles take the full trailers back and forth to the landfill. We have one front-line truck and our reserve is a 1989 model. The loader trucks pulls a trailer and loads it up, takes that full load back to Public Works and then grabs an empty trailer and goes back out. There are five loader trucks; two are front-line and three are reserve.

Brown’s proposal is to replace five of the loader trucks with two straight line trucks – and surplus the loader trucks and the 14 trailers.

“That will eliminate the maintenance cost of all those trailers and will reduce the maintenance of the trucks by reducing the cost from five to two,” Brown said.

“That will also mean we are not going around a neighborhood pulling trailers,” Brown said. “Right now we drive every street looking for what is out there, whether it’s a brush pile or a junk pile.”

Brown added that the department would like to “look at investing in some software that allows us to go where the piles are at instead of driving all over town looking for them. The software would have an app where somebody could go on there and say, ‘I’ve got this out.’ A lot of the apps out there have categories: ‘mattresses or ‘couch.’ There is also a way to phone in.”

Tablets could be placed in the cabs of the trucks used for garbage pickup – the tablets would have icons that the truck operator could click on to indicate they have seen a specific type of bulk and brush while at a house.

“With a combination of reducing our fleet and also reducing the driving all over town looking for things – I believe we can save a lot of fuel and get to those large items left out by the roadways in a better manner,” Brown said. “Right now, we go by every two weeks on your recycling day and I believe we can reduce that.”

Brown assured Council any upgrades would not eliminate jobs within the department.

“Now, this is not going to be an overnight thing,” he said. “I would estimate a year and a half to two years to be fully implemented. Recycling would not change, but the day your brush and bulk would be picked up would. There are two things we want to eliminate – 1) an item sitting on the curb for 13 days and 2) all the windshield time and fuel costs.”

Any eliminated trucks and trailers would be categorized as surplus by the department and once approved by Council as such would be put up for sale. Delivery times for new equipment would be 18 months minimum, according to Brown.

“Right now, if you were to order a truck today, then the best you could hope for would be October to January, during that time frame. The reason that is, the company starts building trucks and you’ve got to get your name on one. If you don’t get your name on that truck, you’re looking at a longer build time, once all those slots are taken and you’re into the next year.”

The cost of a new straight truck is currently $275,000.

“Will that price continue to go up?” Council Member Kay Senter asked.

“That’s a yes-and-no question,” Brown said. “I saw today where used car prices are starting to drop, but the new car prices aren’t, so who knows what’s going to happen.”

“You talked about it being a phased-in process,” City Administrator Tony Cox said. “Is there an opportunity to get one of those trucks earlier?”

“Yes, sir, there is an opportunity to get a truck right now, so I’d like to take that opportunity, being somewhere between October and January delivery,” Brown responded.

Cox addressed Council members.

“In order to get this going we would need to give them a letter of intent, that with the consent of Council we would begin and have you ratify in coming meetings,” he said. “And we’ve got to identify the funding source. We had originally had one of these straight line trucks in the (FY2023) budget; with some of the other problems we had, we deferred that one, so we still have some resources set aside for that … the price of course has gone up for these things. I think by next time we will have come up with a budget adjustment and look forward. But in order to get one and not have to wait the full two years to get it on the street, we’d like your ‘nod’ to go ahead and see if we can put our name on one of the trucks coming down the line.”

After confirming that a letter of intent did not require a down payment, Council provided consent by way of unanimous nods.

“We’ll come back with a follow-up,” Cox said. “Paul and his team have put a lot of work into brainstorming how to do a better job here. We’ve all known a neighbor who pulls the stuff out to the curb the day after the truck comes through the neighborhood. Being able to address that will be a big step forward for the way that our neighborhoods work. I commend Paul for a really good job here.”