Leaf pickup, bear trash cans not working out

Dear City of Whitefish,

I just need to vent. My 80-year-old husband and I have raked and put to the curb, every year at least 65 bags of leaves from the homestead. Every year, two men in a city pickup truck came once a week to remove them like clockwork.

This year we were told to blow all those leaves to the side of the road. Now, what do you think might happen to those leaves when we had those extreme winds during late fall? Well, it does not make for good neighbors when they end up in their yards. Then what happened to the expensive piece of equipment you purchased to suck up all those piles in the street? I will tell you. We saw them once on our street. They drove by the piles, then had to back up all the way down our road because they were too big to turn around. They picked up nothing, and now the leaves are frozen in big piles all the way down the road. So we are still picking up leaves in plastic bags, which you were trying to keep out of the landfill, and having to spend gas money and time to drive them to the dump.

I think the next time you are all having a brainstorming event, you might want to really think about how your decisions on how to spend our money will affect the taxpayer. Oh, yet another thing, we just got our bear trash cans. The bears are now fat and sassy and already in bed. We had to contact the trash company ourselves to have them come and pick up the old cans. They didn’t even know we had the bear cans. Really? Just sayin, next year we might need a better plan.

Diane Rice, Whitefish