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ISU Student: Landlord First Site Has 'Blatant Disregard' For Recycling Ordinance

Recycling cart
Davey Rivers
/
Courtesy
The new recycling cart outside ISU student Davey Rivers' apartment in Normal.

On Monday night, Illinois State University student Davey Rivers https://youtu.be/FLtYshTBvMU?t=940">complained to the Normal Town Council that First Site still hadn’t put a recycling bin outside his apartment—what he called “blatant disregard” for the town’s new ordinance requiring the landlord to do that.

On Tuesday, less than 24 hours later, a recycling cart finally appeared.

“It was not there yesterday,” Rivers said Tuesday. “They must have put it in this morning.”

Davey Rivers speaks
Credit YouTube / Town of Normal
/
Town of Normal
Illinois State University student Davey Rivers speaks to the Normal Town Council on Monday night about his concerns with First Site.

Rivers, a leader of ISU’s Student Environmental Action Coalition, said First Site staff has told him and other students that it doesn’t plan to offer on-site recycling—an apparent violation of the new ordinance.

Rivers said he moved into his First Site apartment on Cherry Street in mid-August, weeks after the ordinance went into effect. Without a recycling cart on site, his recycling—cans, bottles, and boxes—are stacked up in a corner of his apartment with nowhere to go. He doesn’t have a car to drive to a dropoff site.

“I’m very much in favor of renewable practices, educating the public, and all that kind of thing. And I don’t want to just throw away my recycling,” Rivers said. “My roommates were giving me a bit of a hard time about it, because it is just piling up in the corner.”

Now, he can recycle it in the new container outside his building. But he wonders if the cart will be large enough to serve around 120 people living in his building.

Rivers is not alone. Officials with the Town of Normal and ISU’s Office of Sustainability say there have been other reports of noncompliance with the new ordinance. That’s despite landlords across Normal having plenty of time to prepare; the Town Council approved it in July 2018, with implementation not happening until Aug. 1, 2019.

“It does seem to not be going as smoothly as we would’ve hoped,” said Elisabeth Reed, program director for ISU’s Office of Sustainability.

Reed said her office’s interns plans to do canvass-style house calls in the next few weeks to educate residents on the recycling ordinance, using materials from the Ecology Action Center.

The Town of Normal has received a “handful” of calls from First Site tenants who’ve been told by the company that it’s “opting out” of the new ordinance, said Normal Director of Inspections Greg Troemel. But it’s “not a voluntary thing,” he said.

Troemel did a drive-by inspection of between 20 and 25 First Site properties on Tuesday to check compliance, and found eight to 10 of them did have recycling containers. The town has contacted First Site a “couple different times” about the matter, and “I’ve got written notices ready to go,” Troemel said.

The ordinance says property owners could face a penalty of $100 per day for noncompliance, and “each day a violation continues to exist constitutes a separate violation.”

But the town does not want to be heavy-handed about enforcement of the ordinance, especially at the start, Troemel said. The plan was to roll compliance checks into the regular annual inspections process, he said, though the town will respond to individual complaints.

Enforcement is also tricky, he said, because there are so many properties involved. A landlord might be compliant on some of its properties, but not on others.

“I’m less interested in pounding on people and taking them to court, and generally we’ve tried to work with folks to get something figured out,” Troemel said. “But I also think it’s a bit premature—a month and a half in—to start dragging people into court.”

First Site is one of the three largest student-apartment landlords in Normal. The company visibly added recycling to several properties over the summer.

“It’s puzzling,” Troemel said of the company’s approach. “From the tenant’s perspective, I get the frustration.”

Rivers, the ISU student, said he’d like to see the town be more aggressive in enforcing the ordinance.

“It just seems they’re letting a very large corporation get away with breaking the law,” Rivers said.

First Site owner Jeff Tinervin said he had no comment for this story “other than the fact that all of our properties have recycling (bins) on them today.”

Did Rivers’ public comment on Monday night speed up his building getting a cart?

“No,” Tinervin said.

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Ryan Denham is the digital content director for WGLT.
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