Garbage Pickup Will Resume Old Schedule

              Garbage pickup will
resume old schedule
By ROBERT MOORE
Of The Times Staff
The garbage collection schedule
abandoned by Shreveport Mayor Bill
Hanna in the throes of a sanitation crisis
last July will be resumed Monday, ac-cording
to city officials.
Under the planned schedules, re-sidences
that have been receiving
garbage service — collection of
household wastes — on Tuesdays and
Thursdays will now have their garbage
picked up on Mondays and Thursdays.
Residences that have been receiving
service on Wednesdays and Fridays will
return to their old schedule of Tuesdays
and Fridays.
Trash, which is generally defined as
small tree and bush limbs, leaves and
yard trimmings, will be picked up on
regular schedules of Mondays through
Fridays.
The existing schedules were not the
first choice for either the administra-tion
or many residents when Hanna
authorized them in October because
they left two days and five days
between collections instead of the
three-day and four-day periods allowed
under the old schedules.
The garbage schedules were initially
changed in late July when a torrent of
garbage packer breakdowns forced the
mayor temporarily to move to once-a-week
garbage collection on Mondays
through Thursdays. The move left the
public works garage three-day
weekends to repair packers.
With the arrival in October of about a
dozen new packers, the mayor returned
to twice-weekly garbage service of
Tuesday-Thursday and Wednesday-Fri-day
collections.
The schedules reflected a concession
by the administration to workers after
they had threatened to walk off the job
if they lost their three-day weekends.
Under the original schedule, garbage
employees worked four 10-hour days,
getting Wednesdays off. Trash workers
have maintained their five-day, eight-hours-
a-day schedules throughout.
Public Works Director Del Ervin said
late last year garbage workers had
agreed to return to their original
schedules, allowing them Wednesdays,
Saturdays and Sundays off, but the
administration delayed implementing
the old schedules until after the Jan. 17
sales tax hike.
The administration reasoned that a
change before the election might con-fuse
the public if the election had failed
because a defeat might have forced a
return to once-weekly garbage collec-tions
as a cost-saving measure.
Ervin said Tuesday the return to the
old schedules should be permanent, but
he hopes to modify the service — by
combining garbage and trash collection
routes — within the 12 months.
He said that under such a plan,
garbage and trash would be picked up
simultaneously twice weekly.
Before he can institute the changes,
he said, he plans to hire a company with
expertise in setting up computer pro-grams
for sanitation collection routes
to determine the best possible routes for
the city. He said he also hopes to have
received 20 new 25-cubic-yard packers,
10 having been ordered in 1980 and 10
he hopes will be approved in the
amended 1981 budget.
The new packers will combine with
the 27 new 20-yard packers secured late
last year to represent a replacement of
more than 50 percent of the ailing fleet
in two years' time.
Last year's sanitation crisis was
caused by delays in procuring the 27
packers in 1980, the absence of funding
for regular replacement of packers and
officials' failure to realize the need to
buy trucks in February 1979, critical
spending decisions for the year having
been made less than three months after
the change in the form of government.