RUTHERFORD, N.J. – Some local landscapers are planning to fight a proposed ordinance they say could force them to charge their customers up to twice as much as they do now to clean up leaves.
The Borough Council will vote tonight on whether to amend a borough code that prohibits landscapers from blowing leaves in piles onto the street. Homeowners who do their own landscaping are allowed to leave the piles on the street from Sept. 1 to Dec. 31.
The proposed amendment will increase fines for landscapers who violate the leaf cleanup ordinance. If passed, the fines will become effective upon the ordinance's publication on Dec. 2.
During the past couple of weeks, police have been handing out fliers warning landscapers about the prohibition. However, since it had never been strictly enforced, some landscapers believed they were preemptively being forced to comply with an ordinance that had not yet been passed.
"They tried to convince everybody that it was an ordinance. I complied, because I figured if the police gave me something, then it's probably correct," said Dyle MacGregor, who operates Keep It Green, a landscaping company that has been cleaning leaves in Rutherford and other parts of Bergen County for 20 years.
But the new amendment is merely clarifying a law that is already on the books, said Timothy Stafford, the borough administrator.
Landscapers will have to charge their customers extra so that they can dispose of the leaves at a composting plant, said Patricia Meehan, who has operated a landscaping company in Rutherford with her husband, Paul Meehan, for 25 years. For example, a $25 weekly charge to clean leaves could be upped to $50.
Meehan said the proposed ordinance unfairly penalizes residents, such as senior citizens with fixed incomes, who need to hire landscapers but cannot afford to pay the additional fines.
"A lot of our clients are elderly women whose husbands have passed away who can't remove their leaves even if they wanted to," she said.
The proposed amendment was introduced at an Oct. 26 meeting by Councilman George Fecanin, the council liaison to the Department of Public Works, who said it would prevent a cumbersome pileup of leaves in the town.
"We changed it due to the [landscaping] contractors who are possibly bringing leaves from other towns into Rutherford," said Fecanin. Some landscapers may also take leaves from one site and dump them somewhere else within the same town, he said.
While no landscapers have been caught, Public Works employees have been finding mysterious piles of leaves on streets that were recently cleaned, said Thomas Verdino, acting superintendent of the department.
"When we got done, it was broom cleaned. The next day, in 12 hours, there were new 25-foot-long piles on the side of the streets," said Verdino.
However, Meehan said there has only been one person who has been dumping leaves.
"They're trying to make the other citizens suffer for it, which isn't fair," she said