Santa Rosa residents could soon find themselves fined $100 or more for putting their garbage cans out too early or leaving them out too long.
An ordinance under consideration by the City Council on Tuesday would limit the hours containers can be left at the curb to 12 hours before the scheduled pickup or 12 hours afterward.
The law is needed because residents commonly complain to the city that bins left to languish become a neighborhood nuisance, said Mike Reynolds, the city's senior building inspection and head of code enforcement.
"It's been a source of irritation for citizens for a while," Reynolds said.
Residents regularly raise a stink about neighbors who are tardy to retrieve their trash, recycling and yard waste bins.
Reynolds said he receives five to 10 such calls a month on average from people wondering why the city doesn't do something.
The frequency of the calls has increased in recent years since the housing market plunged, leaving more homes vacant due to foreclosure and neighbors concerned that properties are not being properly maintained, he said.
"We've got a lot more homes out there sitting empty because of foreclosure and abandonment," Reynolds said.
But the city doesn't have rules governing time limits on garbage cans, giving Reynolds' code enforcement team no authority to act, he said.
That hasn't always been the case. The city once had such a rule, but when the ordinance was revised in 2004 and again in 2009, the time limit was "inadvertently" eliminated, according to a report by City Attorney Caroline Fowler."
She's asking the council to reinstate that provision.
Reynolds said that in his 11 years with the city, he can't recall ever enforcing a time limit on refuse containers.
If the council restored the provision, he doubts many fines would follow. Code enforcement officials have full case loads and priority goes to issues that pose dangers to health and safety, he said.
Complaints about trash bins likely will fall to the bottom of the heap. Homeowners would first be sent letters educating them about the reinstated rule and requesting voluntary compliance. For most people, that's all it will take, Reynolds said.
If people ignore the rule, fines could be issued, Reynolds said. The first violation would be $100, the second $250 and subsequent fines $500, he said.
Such rules are common in other Bay Area communities, said Steve McCaffrey, director of government affairs for North Bay Corp., which serves about 40,000 residential households in the city.
They are not meant to catch people who are a few minutes or hours late in retrieving their bins, but to discourage people from leaving their bins at the curb all week, which can create "blight," McCaffrey said.
He said he doesn't know how Santa Rosa's rules will be structured. But pickup times in most communities run from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., meaning the time limits extend 12 hours before and 12 hours after those times.
That means bins technically shouldn't be put out before 6 p.m. the night before or left out past 6 a.m. the day after pickup, leaving people plenty of time to comply, McCaffrey said.
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