Holding up a city of Dunkirk curbside pickup schedule, Department of Public Works head Randy Woodbury encouraged residents last week to use that service for brush disposal after the city eliminated its Lucas Avenue brush dropoff point.

The city of Dunkirk has eliminated brush drop-offs at its Lucas Avenue Department of Public Works facility.

“With the tightening of our fiscal belt, we really can’t afford to have a drop off brush pile anymore,” DPW head Randy Woodbury told the Common Council last week. He spoke in response to a question about the matter from Councilwoman Nancy Nichols.

DPW officials and Mayor Kate Wdowiasz “got together and said we’re going to try to just pick it up on the (curb pickup) brush schedule,” Woodbury said. He said people should store brush on their properties and the city can pick it up according to the published schedule.

Woodbury said there are two scheduled curbside brush pickups but noted that a pickup is set “if there happens to be a storm.”

“We will try to find if there is a private landscaping company that would like to take that over. That would be one plan,” he continued. “Another thing is that the county planning division has been working on a regional idea with brush for a couple years now. It would be nice because it is a regional problem. Every community has this problem. We’ve had people try to sneak in from other communities. We’ve had to politely send them away. We can’t even really monitor it for our own people right now.”

Woodbury concluded, “It’s going to be an inconvenience for a while but I think there’s workaround on that. It’s going to save us a lot.”

Councilman Abby Zatorski noted the big brush pile at the Lucas Avenue facility was getting removed, and inquired about it. “We’re going to tub grind that and turn it into mulch and use it for our own facilities,” Woodbury replied. There was $20,000 budgeted for that, he said.

“We do have out of city residents that are utilizing that (brush) service, and we can’t be having that,” Nichols said. “We have enough within the city on our own.”