It shouldn’t take a week to pick up a couch.
Day 7
Reported September 13. Last checked in person September 20.
On Sunday, September 13, I was out visiting neighbors and telling them about my campaign, and I saw this couch dumped on the Ivy Drive median. I reported it on SeeClickFix that afternoon.
I didn’t want to create a page like this. Given the status updates from the city, I had hoped the couch would be picked up in a few days. But while I was out meeting neighbors again on Sunday, September 20, I saw that it was still there. It was then I decided to make this page, because a week is too long to resolve an issue like this. I’m checking on it every day, and this page is where I post what I find. The day it’s gone will be the last update.
What happened to the report
Sunday, September 13, 3:22 pm
Reported on SeeClickFix, with a photo.
13 seconds later
An automatic reply: reports are monitored Monday through Friday during working hours.
Monday, September 14, 7:35 am
A city staff member replied: “Dumped debris has been reported to Recology for pickup.”
As of September 21
No further update. The report is still open and there has been no follow-up since.
The city answered fast. The handoff didn’t.
The people answering these reports aren’t the problem — a staff member picked this one up the next morning. The problem is what happens after. Once a report leaves City Hall, nobody confirms the pickup, and nobody tells the neighbor who called it in. On paper, this couch is on its way to being collected. On the median, it’s still sitting there. The lack of proper follow-up shows that this system is broken.
Every check since
It isn’t just this couch
District 1 files about a quarter of Menlo Park’s illegal-dumping reports — 150 of 555 over the past year — and ours wait longer than anyone else’s.
30%
of District 1 reports took more than a week to clear, against 24% in the rest of the city
26 of 65
reports still open citywide are in District 1 — more than any other district
354 days
that the oldest open report in District 1 has been waiting
The typical District 1 report takes 3.8 days to clear, against 2.7 in the rest of the city. And the city can move quickly when it does: in District 5, the typical report is cleared in about half a day.
| District | Reports | Typical days to clear | Over a week | Still open |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| District 1 | 150 | 3.8 | 30% | 26 |
| District 2 | 77 | 3.1 | 16% | 11 |
| District 3 | 79 | 3.5 | 25% | 7 |
| District 4 | 158 | 3.1 | 26% | 20 |
| District 5 | 91 | 0.5 | 24% | 1 |
What I’ll do about it
I build systems like this for a living. A report that leaves City Hall should come back closed — with the job done and the neighbor told. On the council, I’ll push for:
- A firm pickup deadline, written into the city’s hauling contract.
- Reports that close only when the work is actually done — with a note back to whoever reported it.
- Response times published by district, so a gap like this one can’t hide.
It’s part of my plan to tackle blight with proactive code enforcement. And this is the same median I’ve proposed turning into a neighborhood greenway — native flowers, a walking path, benches. Right now there’s a couch on it. District 1 deserves better.
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Waiting on the city too?
Dumping that sat for weeks, a report closed with nothing done, a problem nobody followed up on. Tell me what happened and where. Every story helps make the case for fixing the system, and I won’t share your name or your story publicly without asking you first.
How these numbers were counted: every illegal-dumping report on the city’s public SeeClickFix system from September 20, 2025 to September 20, 2026, placed in a council district by its map location using the official district boundaries. “Typical” is the median. “Still open” means the report had not been closed by September 20 — which can mean the dumping is still there, or that it was cleared and the report was never closed. Either way, the neighbor who reported it was never told.