Jenkintown budgets $14,000 each year to remove nutrients from your yard

Rick Bunker’s pompous bloviating aside, you do not own the sidewalk in front of your house, but Jenkintown Borough requires you to fix it. You do own all the leaves that fall on your property, and yet Jenkintown Borough will come and collect them — for free. All you need do is rake or blow them into the street, and the borough will come around with its $60,000 leaf mulching machine, manned by at least three employees, and take it all away. This makes sense… how?

Jenkintown’s program for leaf collection costs us $14,000 per year according to the latest budget, up from $12,000 last year (all nice round numbers, incidentally).

I grew up raking leaves and stuffing them into bags, so I know the drudgery of this particular chore all-too-well. In those years, I would have welcomed the opportunity to dispose of leaves that way.

As I learned more about organic gardening, I learned also that leaf disposal not only wastes of time and money, it deprives the land of the nutrients it needed most. Unlike wood mulch, leaf mulch actually helps the soil, yet, we pay the Borough to cart it away.

Here’s all you need to do with your leaves, folks: Mow them. Most of us seem to have gas-powered lawn mowers. Most of those do a pretty good job mulching the leaf material into small enough pieces so you can spread them on your gardens or put them into your compost piles.

I have Mike McGrath to thank for this information. Mike hosts the “You Bet Your Garden” program on WHYY, and he gives out great advice for nurturing your gardens and yards in the healthiest manner possible. Mike writes:

…at this autumnal time of year, the material inside those bags tends to be mostly leaves, which are THE priceless resource for organic gardeners. Shred them up and pour or rake them into a pile or a bin, and those leaves will become fabulous rich, black compost—the backbone of any organic landscape. And shredded leaves alone make a superb natural mulch—preventing weeds, retaining soil moisture and encouraging earthworms to improve the soil underneath.

That’s why most organic gardeners are furiously shredding all the leaves they can gather at this time of year; you never get to August wishing you had made less compost or saved fewer leaves. And, when all of our own leaves have been shredded, mulched, piled or binned, many of us look with longing on those long rows of brown treasure chests sitting out at the curb. Discarded! Like trash!

If you’d like to learn more, visit Mike McGrath’s website and read this article. and this one too.

We have so far reviewed more than 150 permit applications out of about 250, and there are a few immediate take-aways:

Some residents may have gotten badly fleeced. We’ve found several instances where contractors — often the same one — provided vastly different estimates for roughly the same work.

Almost everyone paid more — sometimes significantly more — than what George Locke called “PennDOT’s going rate.” Costanzo is so far the worst. D&D was the best, but D&D abandoned the borough this year, which was unfortunate since almost all of their estimates matched PennDOT’s rate.

The Beaver Hill condo complex also submitted an application for a sizable sidewalk and curb project, and they paid about half the PennDOT rate.

The borough used no fewer than four different forms for this permit, each one with a different set of entry fields. This does not make things easy for the Borough to provide any kind of accurate accounting of this work, should they decide to do so.

At about 250 permits (so far), the borough earned at least $6,250 on applications alone.

Parking: The more you have, the less you need.

As convoluted as that might sound to the uninformed, it simply means that the more actual infrastructure you clear to build it, the less demand you’ll ultimately have for it. It’s a devil’s bargain. Jenkintown does not have a parking problem. It never did. It has a planning problem. If you look at our downtown on a satellite view, you’ll see more space devoted to parking than to actual buildings. Most of that parking is owned by private interests that keeps it mostly empty for most of the day.

Jenkintown’s solution was to get into the parking business itself, create more empty space, and pay dearly for it. As a result, it’s parking fund will continue to run a deficit for years to come, and this deficit will be made up in higher taxes. Therefore, we as taxpayers subsidize the businesses downtown, many of which already have their own parking lots, so we in effect subsidize those as well.

But no matter how much we build, the perception to people who come here by car is that there will never be enough parking. If they can’t park within twenty feet of the door, they will feel inconvenienced. This, despite the fact that when they go to Hatboro or Chestnut Hill or Manayunk, they accept the “inconvenience” as part of the experience.

And once more with feeling: Until PennDOT mitigates the traffic on Old York Road and restores on-street parking, Jenkintown’s downtown will never revive itself.

What isn’t unique to Rochester, is that there is actually far more parking than there are people. In America, the estimate is roughly 800 million parking spaces (for a population slightly over 300 million in our country, and far fewer drivers than that).  We don’t have a supply problem. This is a demand problem…

Source: There Will Never Be “Enough” Parking | Streetsblog.net

This essay was originally written for the StrongTowns.org blog and was published last week. If you agree, please share this with friends and neighbors, especially if you live in Jenkintown.

Jenkintown, Pennsylvania actively promotes itself as a walkable community. Indeed, this borough that barely encompasses a square mile has sidewalks lining both sides of all of its streets. We moved here for that reason among others, but at that time, we didn’t know (and weren’t told) that Pennsylvania has what I believed a peculiar practice of making property owners directly responsible for all the physical maintenance and repair of its abutting sidewalks and curbs. I say peculiar because as a former resident of Massachusetts, we understood and never questioned that the municipality maintained all of the public right-of-way, including its sidewalks.

Last year, when Jenkintown embarked on an extensive paving program, it simultaneously conducted a mass-inspection of the sidewalks and curbs. Suddenly, the borough became of beehive of concrete contractor activity as homeowners scrambled to find someone to do the work before the deadlines.

It didn’t take long before the flaws in this system became wrenchingly evident. Contractors had a pricing advantage in that homeowners had deadlines, and their estimates reflected this. In our case, we had to replace four blocks of sidewalks and 40 feet of curb. We had initial estimates ranging from $3000 to $5000. Failure to comply with the borough meant fines of $185 per day or jail. Also, the borough makes no provision for hardship. Pay up, or go to jail, and likely have your house seized.

However, as someone coming from a state where public works departments do this work, we knew that our unit costs far exceeded that of a wholesale approach. These ordinances result in a haphazard patchwork of sidewalk styles, conditions, and qualities. Where municipalities assume responsibility for the entire public right-of-way, they replace crumbling sidewalks whole neighborhood blocks at a time, resulting in a unified, consistent look that lasts longer and costs far less.

Our own borough informed us that the PennDOT acceptable unit costs for removal and replacement of sidewalks and curbs were $90 per square yard and $35 per linear foot respectively. One contractor wanted to charge us more than $100 per linear foot for our curb job. In other words, we pay for steak but get McNuggets.

Also keep in mind that here in Pennsylvania, municipalities accept the use of concrete curbing. In Massachusetts, they typically use granite which can cost the same or less than our concrete curbs. And granite effectively lasts forever.

We have made the argument to the borough that a wholesale approach spread out over a twenty-to-thirty year period typical for a well-built sidewalk would add less than 3% to the current budget — assuming that all else stays the same. Some fear the potential tax hike that this might bring, but a budget is primarily a statement of priorities. Our borough has already borrowed $2.4 million to build a 66-space parking lot on land they seized, evicting an operating business. The debt service on this lot amounts to nearly $100,000 per year, while the borough’s entire parking fund runs an annual deficit.

To all this, I ask, what brings a walkable town greater value for its taxpayers? More beautiful, better-built streetscapes or a money-losing parking lot that effectively subsidizes the downtown business? If building a parking lot brought such great value, then why doesn’t the business community do it themselves?

Policies that place this burden upon homeowners do nothing to promote the further spread of walkable communities, especially in older suburbs like ours where the sidewalks have reached the end of their effective lifespans. We live in one of the newer sections of town, built in the late 1930s, and a walk around conspicuously shows the lack of real priority this walkable community places on its pedestrians. The borough budget covers the full freight of the asphalt between the curbs, making Jenkintown more accurately described as drivable and park-able.

In my research on this topic, I’ve found next to nothing written in support of a better, more wholesale approach. Indeed, Los Angeles has begun to backpedal on a policy established in the 1970s that took over sidewalk repair from its homeowners, many of whom lived in distressed neighborhoods. Where then might L.A. spend these tax dollars instead? I can’t say for sure, but I do know that the NFL has recently awarded the city a franchise contingent upon significant public contribution. No wonder nobody walks in L.A.

We as advocates for stronger towns and a healthier pedestrian lifestyle must address this reality and soon. In my research, I’ve found no rhyme or reason to the national distribution of sidewalk policies. Five of six New England states place the responsibility with their DPWs. Pennsylvania towns place it on property owners. Portland, Oregon requires homeowners to fix, while Portland, Maine does it themselves. Red state city Knoxville gives it to DPW while blue state Minneapolis puts the burden on homeowners.

People and businesses seeking to invest in a walkable community should expect the municipal embrace of public goods as public responsibilities. The budgets of these communities should necessarily reflect that policy and place a high priority on the quality of its pedestrian experience. We as advocates for that experience must press this point with far more force than we have in the past.