Overland Park is pursuing a pilot program to ensure that residents whose trash pickup is delinquent have another option as a backup.
The pilot proposal follows county-wide trash pickup delays that have left some residents in recent years going weeks without trash removal in their neighborhoods.
In 2022, the city of Lenexa took one hauler to court over the issues. Prairie Village fined the same hauler several thousand dollars for missed trash pickups in 2023.
How did Overland Park get here?
Like in some other Johnson County cities, trash removal in Overland Park is handled mostly on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, which means there isn’t a single hauler removing trash and recycling in the city.
After the issues in the past couple of years with at times weeks-late trash pickup, Overland Park sent out a formal request for information to area trash haulers, movers and other vendors who might be able to help the city address the issue in the future, Sustainability Manager Lara Isch told the Overland Park City Council Community Development Committee on Wednesday evening.
“We were directed to look into ways that we could at least abate the health and safety issue around this,” she said.
From there, they began talking to SWVE Management Holdco LLC (the parent company of 1-800-Got-Junk) about doing a trial run of a stop-gap on-demand trash pickup service when a hauler contracted fails to pick it up for an extended period of time or is unable to do so.
What would the trash pickup pilot look like?
During the studying phase and trial run, Overland Park plans to eat the cost of the backup trash pickup services, but eventually, it would want to make the original contracted hauler(s) cover that cost, Isch said.
“The reality is we’re actually doing them a favor,” Isch said. “If they’re behind and missing pickups because they’re short-staffed or they’ve got a broken truck, this is just less pickups they have to do, which means less missed pickups down the road.”
Here’s how it would work for residents:
- A resident, neighborhood or HOA leader would need to make a nuisance complaint with the city, either through the city’s OP Cares webpage dedicated to trash hauling issues or by phone.
- Then, someone from city staff will verify the problem.
- If the trash hasn’t been picked up by the six-business-day mark following the contracted pickup day, then it is considered delinquent in city codes.
- On that day, if neighbors verify that the trash still has not been picked up, then the backup haulers will be activated.
- Isch said 1-800-Got-Junk expects to be able to pick up delinquent trash within 24 hours of the city notifying them of it.
Isch did say on Wednesday that there are still a few details to figure out before the pilot could start, and there might be a learning curve as it’s getting underway too.
“There’s a whole lot of moving pieces that are different than the ‘grass is too tall in a yard’ code violation,” Isch said, noting that other cities have yet to pursue something similar with which Overland Park could compare. “This is uncharted territory for us.”
Next steps:
- Some of the details of the pilot program in Overland Park are still being hammered out, and a contract is still being finalized.
- Isch said the pilot will likely commence in early 2025 or potentially a little sooner, and it would last for one calendar year.
- If the city does eventually make the pilot program permanent, Isch and City Attorney Michael Koss said some city codes would need to be updated to allow the city to recoup any cost from the contracted hauler responsible for the missed pickups.
- The city is also still planning to conduct a solid waste management study next year, which could have some bearing on how the pilot might be formalized — if at all — down the line.
Looking back: Trash pickup delays spread across Johnson County
