Gainesboro Investigating Possibility Of New Leaf Debris Machine

The city of Gainesboro is looking into its options for a new leaf debris machine in order to care for the city’s streets.

Water Distribution Supervisor Johnny Pigg said the city is currently clearing leaves off the streets manually with a backhoe or blowing them into vacant lots. Pigg said the city already has one of these machines but it has multiple issues and has not been used in the town for a couple of years.

“For that machine, once it picks them up and chops them up, if you just picked them up with it, it would just essentially blow them right back out on the street,” Pigg said. “And also, the one that we’ve got, the inlet where it picks the leaves up is only about eight inches in diameter and it doesn’t pick up wet leaves real good.”

Pigg said the issue is made worse by a number of citizens who will blow the leaves from their yard onto the street or sidewalk, as well as others who will not address their leaves at all and let them pile up in their yard.

“If it’s in a place sometimes to where we don’t have anything else to do with the leaves, if it’s like an empty lot or something, we can blow them back in it and then take a lawnmower and mow them up and mulch them up,” Pigg said. “But then sometimes, if you’ve got them in somebody’s yard, if you blow leaves back in the person’s yard, then they’re going to complain that you’ve piled up leaves in their yard.”

Pigg said it is likely that the city would need to purchase a truck or trailer to transport the new machine and store the bags of leaves it would create. He said there is not a timeline yet for when the city will be able to acquire the new machinery.

“We’re just right now in the stages of just trying to get some quotes together and get some prices on different types of machines and different sizes and kind of bring it back to the mayor and the board of aldermen and go from there,” Pigg said.

Pigg said the city had a truck in the past that had been altered for usage with the old leaf debris machine.

“We had built like an enclosure on the back of it,” Pigg said. “It didn’t work ideally, but it did work to where you could pick the leaves up, but then once you got the truck full, you had to dismount the machine from the truck and then you had to get inside the truck and manually scoop them out, where if you would’ve had a trailer or a truck with a dump on it, you might could’ve disconnected the machine from it and then took it somewhere and dumped it instead of having to shovel them out by hand.”