South Central Reporter

The Greenville city board recently voted on a controversial proposal for brush pickup in the city.

During a Nov. 8 Greenville city council meeting, a lifelong resident came out to voice his opposition to the new proposal. The proposal would create a size limit to the brush piles that would be picked up on the curb. It also created a new option for excessive brush pick up, which residents would have to call and schedule and prepay for. The resident thought that the city was creating an issue instead of solving one and complained about the amount of brush around the city currently that wasn’t being picked up.

Several board members responded to these comments, saying that they were trying to think about the citizens of the city but also the city employees that have to do the brush collection. They said that the head of the public works department offered this as a time and money savings effort to help other areas of city budget and they would not end or diminish the quality of service, but they had to make some changes because residents were abusing the service and cutting down whole trees for pickup.

"The proposed policy has the goal of not wandering all the roads aimlessly. That never made sense to me," Greenville City Councilman Kyle Littlefield said at the meeting. "It feels like, especially in times of $5 gas, sometimes wandering around, just looking for sticks. That seems like a waste of time and a waste of fuel. And what was very needed and what was absolutely broken in the policy was that there was no definition of what brush is. And so we needed to define what brush is because cutting down giant trees is not brush, you know, a tree trunk is not brush. So I think these are our great goals that great things that this proposed policy addresses."

Board members further discussed the proposal and agreed that if the new system did not appear to be beneficial to the city, they would bring it back to the council to amend or change the policy. They also talked about how they will be sending out information with utility bills about the changes and new policy so that residents will be aware of new procedures and a phone number to call. The motion passed with a 3-2 vote.