City Launches Leaf Collection; Backslide Way Resident Pre-Stages Seven Piles

WAUKESHA — The city's annual fall leaf collection program began Monday morning, with trucks working a published weekly route through residential neighborhoods, and at least one resident treating the opening day like a soft deadline worth beating.

Ned England, 70, of Backslide Way, arrived at his curb before 6 a.m. in a lawn chair with a thermos and what he described as "seven distinct piles, each corresponding to a different collection window." He said he built the piles over the weekend using a rake, a leaf blower he declined to name, and roughly four hours of what he called "zone mapping."

"You don't want one big pile," England said. "One big pile gets you one pass. Seven piles gets you seven chances to see which truck comes first." He said the piles were spaced at six-foot intervals along his frontage, each one slightly smaller than the last, in what he called a "decreasing-value test" of the route's efficiency.

An unofficial standard emerges

The leaf program, run by the city's Department of Public Works, covers collection through mid-November depending on weather. A department spokeswoman, reached by phone, said leaves placed before 6 a.m. Monday in some zones were collected by Tuesday morning, a detail that spread quickly on neighborhood message boards and was treated by some residents as evidence of a de facto cutoff.

"We don't have a leaderboard," the spokeswoman said. "There's a schedule. The schedule is public. People can look at the schedule." She added that the department had received eleven calls by Monday afternoon asking whether early placement improved pickup odds, a volume she called "higher than usual for a Monday that isn't trash day."

England was not swayed. By 9 a.m., he reported that two of his seven piles had been collected, which he called "a 28.5 percent clearance rate, which tracks with my projection." He said he planned to rebuild the cleared piles using leaves from a tarp he keeps in the duplex's side yard for exactly this purpose.

Neighbors take notice

Carol Dembski, who lives three doors down from England on Backslide Way, said she noticed the piles Saturday evening and assumed a storm had come through. "Then I saw him out there with the chair and the thermos and I thought, oh, it's that again," she said. Dembski said she herself had raked one modest pile Sunday and "did not feel the need to subdivide it."

"I'm not competing with him. I don't even think he's competing with the truck. I think he's just out there."

— Carol Dembski, Backslide Way resident

England's son Trevor, who lives at the Backslide Way duplex, said he helped carry the leaf blower out Sunday but declined to comment further on the pile strategy. England's other son, Troy, who rents the duplex's upper unit, was reportedly out most of the weekend and returned Monday to find his half of the driveway bordered by pile six.

The schedule, for anyone not timing it

The city's published route divides Waukesha into collection zones, each visited roughly once a week through the program's run. Residents are asked to place leaves at the curb, not in the street, and to keep piles clear of parked cars, storm drains and, per the department spokeswoman, "any kind of chair or cooler situation."

England said he intends to track all seven piles through the season and publish results on his channel, Nedventuresout, which he said has grown to 420 subscribers. "This isn't content," he said. "This is just what Monday looked like." He added that he had already identified a possible eighth pile location near the mailbox, pending "leaf volume later in the week."

City officials said residents with questions about their zone's collection week can consult the published schedule rather than, as the spokeswoman put it, "staging a controlled experiment on a residential street."