Initiative Petition for Adequately Swept City Streets

Austin TX

Description

I have been struggling with the city of Austin for at least a year to properly sweep Austin streets to little avail, a problem that has been going on for many years. The city is refusing to provide regularly scheduled sweeping services to clear streets of all debris: city sweepers intentionally avoid doing a thorough job and purposely leave behind loose gravel and litter in many residential areas of town. When pressed via 311, they sometimes do an adequate job, demonstrating that streets can be adequately swept, yet Austin Resource Recovery sweepers refuse to proactively clear all streets of all debris as a normal scheduled service. All of the attached images were taken immediately after sweeping, some showing long term issues (many years) resulting from inadequate sweeping. Although Austin City Management claims to be currently working on a solution, I am reasonably confident (past history) the city is merely delaying, and that they will offer a woefully inadequate solution that will not provide reasonably clean streets. I would like to promote a city ordinance that will require a good faith performance based sweeping service from CoA so that City Management can no longer neglect their obligation to fully sweep our streets as they will be obligated to provide a level of service that can be measured (entire street, curb to curb, must be swept thoroughly without excuse, sweeper crew will be required to deal with sweeping issues rather than simply neglecting them). City would provide advance notice so that vehicles can park out of the way of sweepers, even/odd address scheduling to allow each half of a street to be fully swept on sweeper days. If anyone has experience (SOS, camping ban) pursuing an initiative petition to get the city to provide a reasonable level of service, please respond to this posting. If you would like to enthusiastically help get Austin streets safely swept, please respond as well; the initiative petition will need 20,000 signatures before the city considers adopting the ordinance or letting it go to citywide vote on the next voting opportunity. The city is now dumping clay sediment into Texas waterways to bind phosphorous (https://www.austintexas.gov/page/harmful-algae-mitigation) while increasing undesirable sediment. A significant portion of phosphorous pollution is coming from rotting leaves in the gutters and impervious parts of the watershed, a source that can be minimized through good faith street sweeping. Additionally, the city has no regularly scheduled program to sweep loose gravel in spite of an MS4 permit obligation that explicitly requires ongoing road maintenance to minimize pollution from roadways. Regularly scheduled sweepers do not intentionally clear roadways of gravel (loose aggregate shed from the chip coated surface), and sometimes intentionally reduce sweeper efficiency in areas with gravel issues (excessive shedding of aggregate from defective surfaces) to avoid picking up too much gravel, resulting in dust and litter also being left behind. Dusty gravel accumulations in the roadway left behind by ARR sweepers are a pollution source (silt, oil, vehicle dust (brakes, tires, exhaust),...) as well as a traction hazard for the traveling public (cars, bikes, scooters, pedestrians,...), yet the city still has not provided a solution that provides a good faith effort to clear streets of debris. Please get involved if you agree city streets should be professionally swept.