Any enthusiasm in town to provide municipal curbside trash collection services does not appear to be accompanied by a willingness to pay the additional taxes and/or fees required to create such a program, at least according to a townwide survey that drew responses from more than 2,300 residents.
Only 23% of the respondents expressed willingness to support a tax increase to cover the cost of curbside services, while 64% said they disapproved — including 44% who “strongly disagreed” with the idea.
Department of Public Works officials said adding a curbside pickup service could cost up to $3.7 million in one-time startup costs and add up to $1.5 million in annual spending. The DPW would need 4 or 5 new packer trucks, trash carts for residents, and 4 or 5 additional DPW staff.
Contracting with a private hauler would not require those investments, but was estimated to cost $2.745 million per year, based on $183 per customer.
The survey was conducted in early 2025, part of a larger study of the Recycling Transfer Station done for the town by Tetra Tech. The consultancy also spent months reviewing the current RTS service model, collecting both qualitative and quantitative data and studying possible alternative models.
“This RTS study was really to dive in deeper to see if there was actually demand to change our service model,” said DPW Director Carys Lustig. “It had been over 20 years since the town had queried the residents to see if the service delivery model that we have was meeting their expectations.”
“Also, we are getting towards the end of the life of the transfer station building itself,” she added. “And when you’re looking at maybe needing to invest capital in the next five to 10 years, you want to ask is this the right place to put your dollars.”
Debra Darby, the Tetra consultant who directed the study, told the Select Board in November that Tetra found “no obvious programming or service gaps, nor the need for large-scale capital improvements appear to be warranted at this time.”
“There were limited survey responses that had complaints about the facility,” she said, noting that there were requests for schedule adjustments, possibly adding evenings and/or Sunday hours.
Lustig noted the RTS budget can support the facility under its current 42 hours per week of access. She said allocating those hours across seven days is bound to leave gaps, especially on weekends.
“The facility is open 42 hours a week, and our staff works 40 hours. So that itself is a bit of a challenge. It’s also a challenging operation to staff.”
Matt DeMarrais, superintendent of the DPW’S recycling and solid waste division, said the survey was both affirming and instructive, and that it satisfied his need for more formal feedback.
“We wanted to really get a feeling from the community,” he said. “For me, the most important part probably was the survey and getting that out to as many people as possible.”
The 2,318 responses was a considerably higher return than the town typically has received from similar survey efforts on other topics. RTS research estimates that the facility is used by 5,500 households, or roughly half the town’s residences.
DeMarrais says they do not have a definitive number on how many residents utilize contracted curbside services. Those residents did not appear to be well-represented in the survey as 72% of respondents reported the RTS was their main method of disposal, compared to roughly 11% who reported curbside collection only. The remaining 17% utilize both.
“The people who are using the facility are happy with it,” said DeMarrais.
“And the people who are in favor of curbside aren’t really willing to pay the costs in terms of an increase in their taxes.”
He said he would have liked to have received more responses from younger families, noting that they were underrepresented in the survey. “We were getting more survey results from people in their 50s and 60s than we were in their 20s and 30s.”
“Identifying that gap would give us some direction going forward. Do we need some kind of social media outreach that lets people know what kind of services we have here?”
DeMarrais said he has had some fruitful conversations over the years with RTS users who showed signs of unfamiliarity with the RTS routine. “You can kind of tell that they’re a little lost and they pull over into a parking spot. I can identify them just by the way they’re looking all around.”
“When I talk to them, once I start bringing up the range of programs that we’re running here, that they can come anytime we’re open and that most of our dropoff options are available.
“They’re pretty impressed. The trouble I have is, how do I reach that person who doesn’t drive through the gate? Do we need some kind of social media outreach that lets people know what kind of services we have here?”
How common is curbside?
According to statistics compiled by the Mass Department of Environmental Protection, municipally provided curbside collection is far from universal in Massachusetts. Of the 294 communities that provided data, 146 mirrored Needham and offered dropoff only, while 119 provided curbside pickup and 29 offered both.
Also, the vast preponderance of communities charge some sort of fee to raise revenue in addition to funding provided by the tax levy. These include annual fees, pay-per-visit charges, pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) fees or RTS access fees. In Needham, this revenue is derived from what residents pay for their yellow trash bags.
Needham is one of 162 municipalities that have adopted the PAYT approach, with only 48 of those communities supplementing their dropoff with curbside collections as well.
Both Lustig and DeMarrais grew up in Needham and are quite familiar with the local trope that often plays out on social media or in chat groups — the often exasperated or baffled “I just paid $2 million to live here and I have to take my own trash to a dump?” genre of comments.
“I was actually surprised at how few people were demanding pickup service,” Lustig said of the survey. She said she spoke to her predecessor as DPW director, Rick Merson, who told her that results from the survey from 20 years ago were the same, “that people would like pickup, but they don’t want to pay any more money for it.”
Save as PDF