Convenience Big Store: Houston trash pickup is often late

January 5, 2024

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Good morning, Houston.

We made it to Friday, y'all!

🌧️ Temperature check: High of 58; low of 47. Justin's insight: Pockets of heavy rainfall are expected Friday across the Houston metro area, but will downpours move out by the weekend? Read more here.

Yasmeen Khalifa
Audience Engagement Producer
yasmeen.khalifa@houstonchronicle.com

Best of the Bayou

Today we're talking about unreliable trash pickup...

If you read one thing: For many residents, Houston's unreliable garbage collection is a familiar issue — and it's one that even the city's newly elected mayor apparently must confront.

What did the mayor say?

In his inaugural address Tuesday, Mayor John Whitmire said his garbage bin had languished at the curb for a week, a common service delay in the city. Residents logged more than 29,000 complaints for missed garbage pick-ups in 2023, the highest tally in at least a decade, according to the city's 311 data.

"We've got to get reliable garbage picked up. Mine's been in front of my house for a week. I thought surely, surely," Whitmire said. "But that's the reality. And we live in a great city. Great cities do not have those issues."

What is the issue?

Solid Waste has long been underfunded, struggling to attract the number of drivers and maintain the number of trucks needed to reliably pick up garbage and recycling bins for its roughly 400,000 customers. Department leaders have said the department's $100 million budget, far behind its Texas counterparts on a per household basis, is not enough to provide quality service.

Every other major Texas city charges residents a monthly garbage collection fee that provides sanitation workers with more resources. Houston does not, so Solid Waste must compete with other departments over property and sales tax dollars for funding in City Hall's annual budget.

Does the mayor have a plan?

Whitmire has said he may explore implementing a garbage fee once he gets settled at City Hall and learns more about the state of the city's finances. If it comes to that, though, he said it "would not be done without plenty of input from residents and City Council," and the city would need to guarantee residents that the money would be used "as advertised."

"We need more and newer trucks and we need more workers, and to attract those workers we must offer a competitive benefits package," Whitmire told the Chronicle.

Read Dylan McGuinness' full story here.

Stay in the Loop

Photo by: Susan Barber

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— Yasmeen Khalifa