Medford officials trash talk new trash plan

The press release starts out with good news. The city secured a $200,000 grant to support increased composting. But further down in the release, things get sticky.

Ten paragraphs in comes the news that as of July 1, 2027, “residential 64-gallon trash carts will be collected every other week, along with recycling at no charge.”

City Council President Zac Bears called making that statement without any preceding community outreach most decidedly putting the cart before the horse. He said the city was not ready for a change of this magnitude and the way it was announced was “at best burying the lead and at worst deeply confusing and worrying.”

But the mayor’s chief of staff, Nina Nazarian, said considering they were 19 months out from implementation, she thought the announcement constituted a slow roll-out.

“This is the initial stages,” she said. “We haven’t begun the significant communications that’s going to be needed with this type of thing.”

The issue

Last week Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn sent out a press release announcing the city received a $200,000 Pay As You Throw (PAYT) grant from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection aimed at expanding the city’s weekly compost collection. Offered at no cost to eligible residents, Medford’s residential weekly curbside composting program began July 1, 2024.

“This is a decisive step toward implementing our 2022 Climate Action & Adaptation Plan,” Lungo-Koehn said in the release. 

The release goes on to talk about a firm release date for a new PAYT program that will streamline the city’s trash program, biweekly trash pick up starting in 2027.

“We were told a couple of years ago that the administration was going to come back and talk about what their plan was to roll this out,” Bears said. “And instead what happened was a press release went out and in paragraph 11 it said ‘we’re doing this in July 2027,’ and it didn’t say, ‘here’s the upcoming public forum, here’s the place you can have a conversation about it.‘ It just seems backwards and it really undermines our goals.”

A resolution

In response to the news, which Councilor Justin Tseng said many heard about on social media, Bears and Councilor Anna Callahan drafted a resolution.

The resolution seeks a report that fully lays out all the pending changes, a public forum so residents can share their concerns, and an exploration of possible alternatives.

Councilors Tseng and George Scarpelli added to it, asking to have the administration look into using illegal dumping fines to offset the trash contract, issue a report on what happens when the grant runs out, and have the Board of Health issue a report on what impact moving to a biweekly trash pick-up might have on the city’s rodent problem, among other issues. 

Tseng said looking back at his own meeting notes from a few years ago, he saw that the city promised to conduct comprehensive outreach before moving down the every-other-week path and that hadn’t been done.

He said he worries the failure to properly prepare residents for this kind of change could cause residents to equate saving the planet with inconvenience, making them want to simply give up on the environment. 

Nazarian said councilors had been presented with this plan twice before, in February 2023 and July 2023, and that the council approved the 10-year waste contract that included eventually going to a biweekly trash pick up.

She also said if the council wanted to revert back to weekly trash pickup, the mayor would be willing to meet to discuss how it might be funded. 

“We never voted to adopt a contract, we never negotiated a contract, we never signed a contract,” said Bears. “We authorized the administration to enter into a contract greater than three years.”

Lungo-Koehn pointed out, via email to Gotta Know Medford, that not only was the council aware of the contract and the eventual move to every other week pick-up, it was shared with the public through a series of “Trash Talk” public workshops. She also said the change would save the city over $1 million per year.

“Trash collection/disposal prices are rising substantially and we don’t want those costs to be placed back on our residents,” she said.

Resident Micha Kesselman said he wasn’t necessarily opposed to the bi-weekly plan, but he appeared flabbergasted by the mayor’s approach in announcing the change, calling it beyond crazy.

“This resolution needs to be followed up on by the administration,” he said. “It’s critical.”

But he did give Lungo-Koehn props for one thing.

“Everyone in here agrees how ridiculous this is,” he said. “She’s brought all of us together.”

 “We believed all elected were on the same page about this contract change considering that the council voted to approve the plan, but if the council would like the city to pivot we will collaborate on what they think is best,” Lungo-Koehn said.

“We need the administration to step up and do this right,” said Councilor Kit Collins. “That’s what we’re asking for.”