Letters to the Editor: February 20 – 26, 2020

City of F.C.’s Leaf Mulch Program Needs Reworking

Editor,

I’ve lived here since 1994, and back in the early years of my residency, one could arrange to have the City of Falls Church deliver leaf mulch to your driveway. We, along with many of our neighbors, were supplied in this way with a pile of rich, nutritious leaf mulch for our landscaping, at no charge, while supplies lasted.

Over the years the handling of mulch in the City has undergone dramatic changes. Delivery ended and turned into “mulch loading events” near the Recycling Center where one could bring a truck and have a front loader fill it with this nutritious compost. These events took place on the weekend and we always marked our spring calendars. In recent years the loading events have been moved to limited hours during the week, when most citizens are at work, limiting the event to the retired, or to local landscaping businesses.

The City continues to pile a big mountain of mulch for the citizens to load, on their own, but it’s located at the end of a narrow passage near the recycling dumpsters. Anyone that has had to load mulch, shovel by shovel from these piles knows it is backbreaking work and trying to navigate your car or truck in this limited area among like minded residents is challenging to say the least.

The mulch processing is paid for using our tax dollars, but the return of the mulch product back to our yards has diminished. The new process is completely inadequate and severely limits the ability of the public to access this precious resource. If Falls Church really wants to be the Little “Green” City it claims it wants to be, a higher priority on mulch accessibility should be considered.

I would like to propose the delivery of leaf mulch to interested City residents be reinstated, and to restart the loading events on the weekends when the majority of citizens have the opportunity to participate. Falls Church needs to reprioritize this resource and let it go full circle again.

Luanne Lukes

Falls Church

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