For the better part of two decades, North Little Rock residents have avoided the annual autumn hassle of bagging their own leaves.
Instead, people push the leaves plaguing their lawns into the road. Then, city crews cart out special trucks to wind through a maze of streets and vacuum those leaves off the pavement.
The ordeal is expensive and requires a lot of manpower, said Harold Ford, director of North Little Rock's sanitation department. But crews do it anyway, he said, because the program is so beloved.
Beginning every fall, six trucks divide North Little Rock into sections and scour for leaves like large roving vacuum cleaners. Each machine looks like a garbage truck but with a mustard yellow contraption hooked up to the back equipped with a rubber hose, called a boom, that's 15 inches in diameter.
As one worker creeps the truck forward, another swings the boom back and forth across the gutter and onto the curb. A third worker rakes more leaves into its pathway as piles disappear through the mouth of the hose.
Inside the machine, the leaves are chopped to bits by spinning blades, then spat into the back -- creating a puff of dust that rolls off the top of the truck and envelops the crew as they work.
"It's a dirty job," Ford said, noting that workers wear goggles and masks to protect their faces. One employee, William Boatwright, said he sometimes finds leaf pieces in his ears at the end of a shift.
But their hard work is appreciated, said Joshua Louis. He's been on the job a little over a week and has already gotten cookies, a gift card and a few thank-yous from North Little Rock residents. Their gratefulness surprised him.
"I didn't think people really paid attention to anything like this," Louis said.
In December alone, the city swept up 5,040 cubic yards of leaves -- a figure that would fill two-thirds of the Goodyear Blimp (7,500 cubic yards), overflow an Olympic-sized swimming pool (3,300 cubic yards) or top off 25,000 average bathtubs (one-fifth of a cubic yard each).
And that was a down month, Ford added.
After the city scoops up the leaves, the job still isn't done. The remains are sent to American Composting, an organic recycler, where they are fed into a 50-foot-long grinder, mulched, left to sit for a year, screened and sold back to Arkansans, owner Jim Willits said.
The whole thing is "very green," Ford said, though the work is slow-going. With good weather, dependable labor and functional trucks, just one pass through the city takes four to six weeks, Ford said. They do two to three passes a year.
It's not cheap, either. North Little Rock hires around 18 people, trains them and employs them for four months. There's also the cost of fuel, routine maintenance and repairs when a truck meets stray gravel or an errant mailbox.
Plus, the service is provided for free -- sort of, Ford said. The trucks are covered by tax revenue, but residents do not pay a fee like in other Pulaski County towns.
At one point, Little Rock looked into starting a similar program but decided against it, city spokesman Jennifer Godwin said. It'd be a huge task, she said, because the capital city has nearly three times as many people as North Little Rock.
Little Rock residents bag their leaves and set them on the curb. The pickup is covered by a solid waste fee that's included in residents' water bills.
Ford prefers that people use the bagging method but said most folks love the idea and convenience of just raking leaves to the curb.
Some people love it so much they joined an online fan club. Kevin Miller, a North Little Rock real estate agent, made a Facebook page in 2015 dedicated to the city's "Super Sucky Leaf Truck."
The forum was created to be a little "tongue-in-cheek," Miller said, though now it operates like crowd-sourced GPS. Users type all-caps updates and upload photos to keep more than 400 fellow members informed on the trucks' whereabouts.
The group must stay on topic, and all unrelated posts will be "raked into a pile at the curb and disposed of in a very efficient manner," the page states. Most people are enthusiastic, Miller said, though he has booted the occasional person who bashed the trucks for not showing up on time.
"If that's the worst issue you've got, I think you're really going to be OK," Miller said.
Ford said he knew the service was popular with the people he serves but was unaware of its Facebook following. When told about the page, he laughed and said, "Wow."
"It's very well appreciated when the people appreciate us," Ford said.
Metro on 02/13/2017