Garbage pickup blunders confuse community

Over the past several weeks, many Kanehsata’kehró:non have noticed their garbage not being picked up on schedule.

At Mohawk Gas Bar, Ruby Powless said the garbage bins on site were overloaded after a garbage pickup was missed this month.

“We were stacking the trash bags in the bins as much as we could,” said Powless.

After the bins were full, the business and residents who live in that area had to start collecting trash bags outside of the bins.

“It started looking like a dump,” said Powless.

Only a few days earlier on January 5, the Oka municipality announced on its Facebook page that garbage pickup had resumed. However, the lack of prior notice from the waste collection company made it impossible to disseminate official communication, reads the post.
“Therefore, only the bins that were already at the curb were collected,” it said. “We expressed our strong dissatisfaction to the collector with this lack of communication.”

The city announced an additional garbage pickup on January 8, but the short notice took many residents, such as Powless, by surprise. They were unprepared, and some bins were not picked up. 
Some households in Kanesatake did not have their garbage collected on January 8, according to Colette Beaudoin, director of recreation and communication for the municipality of Oka.

Sandra Harding, executive director at the Riverside Elders Home, said the centre also had an unscheduled garbage pick-up during the holidays.

Before Christmas, Harding noticed there was no scheduled garbage pick-up time over the holidays. Since garbage is picked up bi-weekly, skipping a date would mean the Elders Home would have had to accumulate four weeks of garbage before the next pick-up date.

“We’re feeding 13 people. We have a lot of waste, and there is going to be an overflow, for sure,” said Harding.

They had planned to put the overflow of garbage into the garage to keep animals from damaging the bags.

But on Friday, December 27, the garbage was picked up without any notice.

While this was a relief for the Elders Home, Harding and many of the residents down the same street had not put out their bins for removal and had to deal with extra trash bags at home.

Both Powless and Harding said these unannounced irregularities in the schedule have occurred throughout this past year.

Mohawk Council of Kanesatake (MCK) caretaker council member Brant Etienne said the MCK contacted Oka and told them what was going on. “To our knowledge, it’s a new company dealing with it, and they’re having some sort of logistical issues. I don’t know the details on it. Hopefully it gets results soon.”
On January 13, the Kanesatake Health Center (KHC) posted on its Facebook page that the company responsible would make up for the missed collection on January 14.

Beaudoin said the garbage collection over Christmas affected residents in both Oka and Kanesatake.
“As for the blue bin, the December 29 collection was disrupted by freezing rain; although service resumed, mountainous areas could not be serviced until the next regular collection on January 12,” Beaudoin wrote in a statement.

The service delays over the past year were caused by weather conditions, logistical challenges to the service providers, and closures during the holiday season, wrote Beaudoin.

Garbage collections begin around 7 a.m., Beaudoin wrote in the email, and bins should be placed with the wheels facing the house.

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