To the Editor:
The Municipality is recruiting volunteers to keep the drains clear and prevent flooding. I have volunteered to adopt a drain and have named it Mozart.
To keep the drain from clogging the Municipality has provided me free of charge a backpack with goggles, gloves, rake, mask, and a high visibility jacket.
I’m all set to help prevent Jefferson, my street, from flooding. A laudable project? On second thought — no!
By volunteering to keep the drain clear I am complicit and aiding and abetting an ill-conceived system for garden refuse collection. I am treating the side effects and not the cause.
We are asked to throw our weeds, twigs, and branches outside of our houses to await pick up on specified dates. We are supposed to place the garden waste on the curb, but often it sits outside for weeks and falls into the road hence clogged drains.
Eventually an enormous machine designed for much heftier construction work grates along the road surface to scoop up the waste into waiting trucks.
I am grateful that our waste is picked up at all. But I was used to a more efficient, cleaner, hygienic, and reliable system where I moved from three years ago. There we bagged up yard waste and/or put it into clearly marked bins and it was collected each week on the same day as recycling.
If a similar system were to be adopted here there would be no clogging of the drains, no flooding, and the Municipality would not need to administer an Adopt a Drain program and bear the added cost of volunteer drain-cleaning kits.
Princeton, we can do better.