Because of poor communication and a lack of coordinated customer service, some mountain community residents and landowners have been left vulnerable to grifters and burglars seeking to victimize them.
IN accordance with state legislation, Senate Bill SB-1383, and a recently revamped franchise agreement between Big Bear Disposal, Inc. and the City of Big Bear Lake, Big Bear Disposal has been, since mid-to-late June, providing its customers with new 96-gallon gray carts for trash and 96-gallon blue carts for recyclables.
Senate Bill 1383 was passed several years ago and requires requires all jurisdictions in California to provide organic waste – essentially food waste – collection services to all residents and businesses. The implementation of SB 1383 has been delayed several times, and in multiple areas it is now being actuated. The gray trash carts supplied by Big Bear Disposal are intended to accept all non-recyclable solid waste including food waste.
In the mountain communities, particularly in Big Bear, many who own land there have dwellings or cabins as second homes or vacation homes, such that they are absent from them for a good deal of time.
In many, though certainly not all, cases, those absentee owners are present more during the winter or even the spring or autumn months than they are during the summer. In some cases, they may not be present for week or months on end.
As in the more urban environments down the hill, trash service in the mountain communities is weekly. Most mountain residents who are present set their trash out the night before or the very early morning of the day of collection and retrieve the empty bins shortly after the collection has occurred, usually in the afternoon or early evening of the same day.
With Big Bear Disposal’s delivery of the new bins, those properties where there are absentee owners have now become easy to discern because at the front of the driveways leading to those residences are two long neglected new trash bins.
Burglars can now conveniently drive through the mountain community neighborhoods and note with ease where there are homes that are vulnerable to burglary because there is no one home to watch over the property or the valuables that are contained within them.
In some Big Bear Lake neighborhoods, as many as four out of five homes are empty during most summer weekdays.
Moreover, the proliferation of trash bins along the street are for many people an eyesore.