CITY CREWS WILL RETRACE STEPS AND RETURN TO EARLY LEAF COLLECTION ZONES

Amid complaints that the city's leaf collection program was started too soon, Cape Girardeau street crews will return to some neighborhoods where leaves have only recently fallen.

Emmett Baker Jr., Cape Girardeau's projects coordinator, said he's uncertain which areas will get a second collection.

"We're discussing it now," Baker said. "(Assistant City Manager) Doug Leslie and (City Manager J. Ronald) Fischer expressed their wishes for trying to go back and pick up a few of them.

"I don't know how we're going to do this, but they have expressed their wishes to retrace our steps a little."

The public works department decided that the annual leaf collection program, which in the past has made two passes through each neighborhood in the city, this year would only make a single pick-up in each of six zones in the city.

This week, street crews are collecting leaves around the campus of Southeast Missouri State University. They'll return next week to an areas west of North Kingshighway and north of William Street.

"We don't know yet when we're going back into some of those other areas," Baker said.

City Manager J. Ronald Fischer said the city will continue the leaf pick-up on schedule. Upon completion of the six zones Dec. 17, crews will return to the first two or three zones where leaves remain.

"Right now, the university is going to be out of session for Thanksgiving," Fischer said. "We're going to try to really pick up that area while they're gone.

"Then, as we have time, we're going to go back through area one and two and spot pick them."

Fischer said that "90-plus percent" of leaves have fallen.

"Everything we collect now, we won't have to go back through," he added.

Baker said the leaf collection program has proceeded "pretty well" despite nature's lack of cooperation.

"Our leaf drop-off site on West End Boulevard is going really good this year, and a lot of people are utilizing it," he said. "We really didn't think it would go off that good in the first year."

Baker said the drop-off site is designed for people who had leaves fall to the ground after city crews had already passed through their neighborhood.

"We really put that in for this one-time pickup so that people would take their leaves down there after we went through their zone, and they've been doing that," he said.

"Of course it's something new, and it's hard to put something new on people in the city," Baker added. "But they have really accepted it pretty well -- most of them."

Residents are asked to rake leaves to the curb, but not on the curb or street. Crews then come by with a special vacuum unit that scoops the leaves into trucks.

Uncooperative residents who raked leaves into the street and the heavy rains and high winds last week hasn't helped the city clear the leaves.

"You're going to see leaves in the street -- we expect that," Baker said. "People think that if the leaves lay in the yard, it's going to kill their grass. It does for a little while, but it comes back."

Even when the leaves are raked to the curb properly, it's not always easy to scoop them up.

"We're evaluating some new equipment, and toward the end of the season we'll be better able to determine how well that's worked," Baker said. "Wet leaves are hard to pick up, and it's been kind of wet for us."

Fischer said the leaf collection program aims to mitigate problems caused when leaves clog city storm sewers. He said it's particularly important for residents to refrain from raking leaves into street gutters, where rains will wash them into the sewers.