This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.

Chester Officials Working Toward Trash Disposal Solution in Village Center

With major construction on Main Street completed and beautification of the downtown area a priority, the unsightly appearance of residents’ and businesses’ trash cans awaiting pick-up and retrieval on the sidewalk in Chester has become an issue.

Emergency Management Director Ray Guasp, who is co-head of the town’s long-term recovery task force, described the disposal of garbage and trash in the village center at an Aug. 18 Board of Selectmen (BOS) meeting, as “definitely a hot point,” in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.

Restaurants, which now use the sidewalk as an area for outdoor dining, are being affected as well as merchants with potential customers, not to mention residents, who walk downtown.

At an Aug. 26 BOS meeting, Chester First Selectman Lauren Gister said the trash cans are present on the sidewalk “until sometime in the morning when the trash hauler comes and picks it up and then the trash cans just sit there and maybe there’s a spill of some liquid and now our nice beautiful sidewalk is kind of disgusting, so now it’s become a bigger problem.”

The influx of disposable face masks and rubber gloves have also increased the amount of trash in the village area, according to Guasp.

“We’ve just dressed up the downtown so beautifully and for us to have overflowing garbage cans throughout the downtown filled with different types of trash, but including masks and at one time rubber gloves…it is a problem, it can become a larger problem,” he said on Aug. 18.

The long-term recovery task force is looking into potential solutions and discussed the idea of having two Dumpsters in a designated area outside of the village center for merchants and restaurants to use for garbage disposal.

A formal proposal by the task force has not been presented to the selectmen yet, as “we want to make assurances that businesses are going to buy into our idea,” said Fire Chief James Grzybowski, who is the other lead on the long-term recovery task force, on Aug. 18.

Any proposal by the long-term recovery task force would need to include some kind of consensus by downtown business owners and address several concerns identified by the Chester BOS.

These include the distribution of cost for using the Dumpsters and whether any type of policy on trash would apply to households in the downtown area, as identified by Selectman Thomas “Tom” Englert on Aug. 26.

Another is upkeep of the Dumpster area.

“Who is going to maintain this area and what about runoff of any kind…garbage leaks, where is that leakage going to go?” Selectman Charlene Janecek asked on Aug. 26.

Another question, posed by Gister, was whether a camera might be necessary to ensure that the Dumpsters are used by the downtown businesses, and not individuals who might leave bags of garbage outside of a locked gate.

Gister noted the potential location for the Dumpsters, the Maple Street Parking lot, was an additional concern and questioned whether its proximity to the woods might attract wildlife such as bears.

She commented further on the complexity of the issue saying, “I want to solve the problem and I would love to just make an ordinance that says either if you have trash cans, they can’t be on the sidewalk past 8 a.m. in the morning or no trash cans or what have you, but it’s not really that easy.”

The First Selectman’s Office is currently conducting research on the towns in Connecticut with trash ordinances for their downtown area, according to Gister.

The BOS anticipates a formal proposal on the issue by the long-term recovery task force in the near future.