Move afoot to require bear-resistant trash cans

It's the latest act in Anchorage's love-fear relationship with its biggest wildest life.

Bears are the summer visitors who never stop coming. They pop up when the snow melts, drifting down trails and into schoolyards and subdivisions, tilting bird feeders to scarf down sunflower seeds, popping out of Dumpsters, taking down moose calves, jerking fat salmon out of creeks and occasionally startling the bipeds with whom they share the municipality.

Most of those bear-human encounters end peacefully. Sometimes, an incautious bear gets hit by a car, or shot down by someone defending themselves, their animals or their property.

Every few years, someone gets mauled. It happened twice last summer in the same city park, and a dozen or more other people had encounters they'll never forget.

There are lots of reasons bears hang out in and around Anchorage. One big one is something all of us can do something about, but too few do: Take care to keep all that tasty stuff we throw away in a place so secure that bears can't get at it.

Rick Sinnott, the Anchorage area biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game, spends much of every summer talking up the importance of securing trash and responding to calls for help in neighborhoods that don't do a good enough job of it.

But if the Regulatory Commission of Alaska goes for a new plan advanced by Alaska Waste, people who live on the Hillside, Girdwood and in other rural parts of town would have to use specially designed, bear-resistant trash containers.

That's not likely to happen anytime soon. Alaska Waste's chief operations officer, Jeff Riley, guesses it will take more than a year for the company's rate request to be decided.

GRADUAL ROLLOUT

Alaska Waste serves all of Anchorage outside the city-owned garbage collection zone near downtown and in Midtown. It wants to provide the "bear carts" at no extra cost to the 10 percent of its customers on the Hillside, Girdwood and in parts of Eagle River. Those customers would have to use them if they want Alaska Waste to pick up their trash. Alaska Waste customers who live in the company's urban, "core" service areas -- northeast Muldoon, for example -- could still rent the bear carts for $5 a month if they wished.

If the regulatory commission grants the company's request, the new requirement would be phased in over time, Riley said, and likely be tied to development of a new type of bear-resistant garbage can that the company's dump trucks could pick up and empty mechanically, a money saving innovation.

Right now, someone must unlock the lids of the bear-proof cans before they can be dumped in the truck.

"Sometimes in the winter it's a difficult handling for the driver, where they're shaking that glove off just to release the lock," Riley said.

"We've put a lot of pressure on the manufacturers for some type of automation that would make this more user friendly for you the consumer and for us in service."

A go-ahead from the regulatory commission "gives us the ability, when a new product comes out, to decide to move to that new product," Riley said.

Sinnott hadn't heard about the company's proposal to require bear-resistant cans in some neighborhoods. But anything that keeps bears out of garbage is a good idea to his mind, and Anchorage isn't the only city scrambling to find ways to keep bears out of trash.

"This is a problem in many communities across North America, Canada. Many of the states are having problems, with black bears especially," he said.

ON THE EDGE IN STUCKAGAIN

It's hard for even careful, responsible residents to secure trash in a way that bears can't tear into it. Last year in a pilot program, the state and the garbage company cooperated with private sponsors to offer bear-resistant trash cans to residents of two neighborhoods with a lot of bear traffic: densely populated Muldoon neighborhoods bordering Fort Richardson, and Stuckagain Heights, which is all but surrounded by Bicentennial Park, Chugach State Park and Fort Rich.

The bear cans were especially popular in Stuckagain -- nearly four of every five homeowners were using one by the end of last summer, and bear problem calls there dropped significantly, according to Elizabeth Manning, a spokeswoman for Fish and Game who also coordinated the pilot program.

Exact stats aren't available, Manning said, but typically Fish and Game gets several calls a week about garbage-diving bears in Stuckagain. Last summer, with most residents using the bear-resistant cans, a handful came in all summer.

And that was in a summer when bear problems escalated everywhere else.

Next door to Stuckagain, two women were mauled on the Rover's Run trail in Bicentennial Park. Two dozen bears were shot and killed, and five were hit by cars.

Things have calmed down some this year.

According to a Fish and Game count, 11 bears, including five cubs, have been killed in defense of life or property so far in 2009.

"Every year is different, and we don't always know why," Sinnott said.

Getting fewer calls about bears doesn't necessarily mean fewer bears are about. "Sometimes just a handful of bears, two or three, can make a lot of difference in the number of calls," he said.

South Anchorage Assemblyman Chris Birch, whose district includes Hillside neighborhoods next door to Bicentennial Park and Chugach State Park, sees another factor. After the two maulings last year, the city closed the popular Rover's Run trail this spring.

People are still spooked, he said.

"When you have a couple of highly publicized bear attacks, there's kind of a natural tendency for people to stay away."

CUMBERSOME CANS

The bear can experiment in Stuckagain Heights may have succeeded last summer, but by the middle of this year, a lot of those homeowners had returned the cans.

The 96-gallon containers are big and heavy. They are wheeled, but wheels work a lot better on paved drives and roads than on canted gravel drives on the Hillside.

"We ended up not continuing the service this year simply because we live on a very steep, rocky driveway," said Stuckagain Heights resident Mary Rosenzweig. Getting the hefty containers up and down the drive was a hassle, she said.

That, and Rosenzweig says her family does a lot of recycling and composting. One smallish bag of trash a week is about standard for their home.

The cans were effective at keeping bears away from garbage, however.

Steve Walker, another Stuckagain homeowner, is a fan. He still sees bears in his neighborhood, but they're usually just passing through.

"It does reduce the presence of the bears and keeps them safer, because trash-eating bears end up getting killed," Walker said.

Sinnott, the Fish and Game biologist, said the cans work when used the way they're intended.

"The people who are using the containers and using them correctly, we're getting testimonials from those people," he said: " 'The bear tried for half an hour to get into this thing and couldn't.' "

"But I don't know if we'll see a real difference just solely attributable to the containers until we get a significant number of people using them. If even one of 10 people in the neighborhood is providing garbage and stuff for bears, everyone else is still gonna see the bear because it's walking through the yard. We're going to need to see pretty good compliance before we really turn the corner on attracting bears to the city."

PARTIAL SOLUTION

The Basher Community Council, which includes Stuckagain, has reservations about Alaska Waste's idea for mandatory bear-resistant containers.

The council's executive committee says the garbage company shouldn't get to dictate who has to use the bear resistant containers and who doesn't.

In comments filed with the state regulatory commission by its president, Dave Keddington, the council says that decision should be made in cooperation with state Fish and Game officials and a new, still-vacant wildlife safety officer position the Anchorage Assembly created this spring. The council also noted that the neighborhood's steep drives are a problem.

"We have a number of residents who physically cannot use the bear tipper carts due to driveway design," the council said.

In an interview, Keddington, speaking only for himself, said the bear cans are a logical first step, but not a solution to the question of how bears and humans can coexist in Anchorage.

A former Air Force pilot, Keddington remembers serving on Elmendorf in the 1990s, when geese were so prevalent that fighter pilots taxied around them. The crew of an AWACS jet paid the price in 1995, when the plane struck a flock of geese and crashed on takeoff, killing all 24 aboard.

He sees a lot of bears in his neighborhood that show little if any reluctance to wander through his yard. He looks at Bicentennial Park and sees a taxpayer-financed bear smorgasbord of salmon and moose, and a public park that taxpayers are warned to be very careful of using.

"The moose and salmon population going through that park is unbelievable," Keddington said. "If I was a brown bear, I'd set up camp in Stuckagain Heights, too."

And with no hunting in decades, bears don't fear people and show little interest in avoiding them.

"We've had plenty of warnings here that this bear situation is probably getting out of hand," he said. "So what do we do? Do the people want to give the bears the municipal park? That is the voter's prerogative. Or do we want to kind of put a post in the ground and say, we've got a 4,400-acre park here that we really want to hold on to. ...

"This is not a state park. Not a national forest. It's a municipal park," he said. "Typically, municipal parks are established for human beings. Recreation.

"This whole issue is going to come to a head when people decide whether they're willing to pay taxes for a piece of land ... and lose it because of bears."

EARLY BREAKFAST

Elsewhere on the Hillside, the bears are out.

High up in the Rabbit Creek area, Lori Davey says she's seeing more bears this summer, and more bear problems. The garbage company is partly to blame, she said.

"We used to never see grizzly bears, and we still don't see many," she said. "Our problem is the black bears hanging around. They used to come through from the Upper Hillside ... and we would see them for a week in the springtime, then we'd hardly see them again in the summer. And now they're just there all summer.

"Two weeks ago, I was driving down ... and there was a mom and two babies, mom teaching the two babies how to get in the garbage."

Davey's neighborhood wasn't involved in the bear-can project last summer. And she canceled her garbage pick-ups months ago, "when they started picking it up at 6 o'clock in the morning. ...

"When you pick up garbage in an Upper Hillside area at 6 o'clock in the morning, everybody took it out the night before. We didn't have a bear problem up here until people started taking their garbage out the night before."

WHAT'S NEXT

Riley, the Alaska Waste operations officer, said he expects the company to confer with Sinnott and other state wildlife officials when deciding which rural neighborhoods should get the bear-resistant containers.

If the regulatory commission approves the request.

Grace Salazar, a spokeswoman, said the commission in late August ordered a review of the company's rate filing, which includes the mandatory bear can request. That's typical, she said.

The review could take up to 450 days, and will include a public hearing at some point, Salazar said.

---

Contact Don Hunter at dhunter@adn.com or 257-4349.