Baltimore's mayor is no line-jumper

'Five dollars a leaf'

Municipal leaf-sucking made a comeback this week.

So, unmitigated joy in the leafy neighborhoods that have griped since the O'Malley administration cut the service?

Not quite.

Seems some people weren't pleased because, well, most of the leaves are still on the trees. Picky! Picky! Picky!

The citizen journalist previously known as my husband shot video of a giant leaf-sucking truck crawling down our Southwest Baltimore street Monday morning, vacuuming in vain at nearly leafless pavement.

"Five dollars a leaf" was his unofficial cost estimate.

OK, one neighbor had managed to amass a good-sized pile, but she's an overachiever.

DPW spokesman Kurt Kocher said the leaf-sucking was planned quite a while ago, to give neighborhoods plenty of notice to move cars and rake leaves into the street.

Somebody should have given the trees a heads-up. For some reason, they held onto their foliage longer than usual this year, Kocher said.

"I always think of Halloween as the time when the leaves are pretty much gone around here," he said. "You can have a storm that would come through and really take them off. You can't predict. You have to schedule and say 'OK.' "

Kocher said the lack of leaves wasn't that unfortunate because DPW was mostly interested in testing out $421,000 in new leaf-sucking equipment, two vacuum trucks and five vacuums that attach to dump trucks. (Purchased before the recent economic downturn, he noted.)

Baltimore got rid of its leaf trucks several years ago to save money, over the objections of homeowners who thought it was a pain to stuff leaves in bags. Then the city, which uses the leaves for mulch, discovered it was a pain getting the leaves out of the bags.

Leaf-sucking is being tried out in 13 neighborhoods. In future years, the city might charge a fee for the service, which could offset the cost.

Let's hope the leaves come down before anybody ponies up.

See video of the city's leaf-sucking truck at baltimoresun.com/vozzella.