As fall ends, county residents are wrapping up Thanksgiving leftovers, getting a jump start on holiday shopping, and wondering what to do with all those wet, messy leaves in their yards.

This year, that got Potomac resident Michael Anestos thinking. A resident of the Holbrook neighborhood, he doesn't receive county leaf vacuuming service, which is offered twice a year for a $93 fee to many downcounty homeowners. Nor does he receive county trash pickup service — which is provided for $75 a year, assessed on top of the $210 recycling collection fee charged across the county — available to many in the county's southern stretches. The fees are assessed through the annual property tax bill.

Instead, he must deal with the leaves himself and pay a private contractor about $20 a month to pick up his trash. "We're paying extra for this, but you just do it because it becomes habit and no one really questions it," Anestos said. "Once you bring it up, you realize, ‘Wow, we're paying extra for something that others are getting.'"

"In this area, we have bigger yards and big trees, and just with all the leaves, that's a hell of a lot of work," said Holbrook resident Erwin Mercado.

Besides the extra cost, different neighbors contract with different collection companies, meaning a lot of trash trucks and noise on the streets in the morning, Anestos said.

The predicament highlights what some call a problematic county refuse collection system. Montgomery County provides recycling service to the nearly 210,000 single-family homes in the county outside of municipal areas, according to Eileen Kao, chief of waste reduction and recycling for the county. However, only about 90,000 of those homes — located in a district largely concentrated in the downcounty — are also provided refuse pickup service.

The two districts were developed in the 1950s or 1960s, when most of the single-family homes were located in the southern part of the county and the northern portion was largely undeveloped, Kao said.

Some outside of the refuse collection district are provided trash service through homeowners associations. But there is a process to petition to be included in county service, and petitioners are on the rise, according to Robin Ennis, who heads the county's collection services division.

"I'm seeing it happen more and more, and the primary reason that we hear people are concerned is the number of trash trucks in their area," Ennis said. Often, she said, petitioners cite environmental concerns.

During the petition process, homeowners must propose a trash collection area of 450 homes, or 200 homes if they live adjacent to the county refuse collection area. Twenty-five percent of those homeowners must sign a petition, Ennis said.

But that places an undue burden on those located outside the service area, Anestos said. He advocates for the service to be expanded now that development has expanded further north and west. "The county has decided, OK, in order to give you what we already give others for no reason other than an archaic framework from the ‘50s or ‘60s, please jump through all these hoops," he said. "Everyone is very busy, so in order to do that, I smell hours of time."

A separate petition process exists to be included in the county's leaf collection area, which is handled through a different county department, according to Steven Suprata, the county's vacuum leaf collection program manager. The leaf collection district is also concentrated in the downcounty and was also set in place many years ago — Suprata estimated in the 1920s.

That petition process requires a proposed area of 100 homes, and 80 percent of those must agree to the service, Suprata said. He's usually inundated with requests to mail out information packets about the petition process when the leaves start to fall.

"I've sent out hundreds of info packets over the last three or four years, but the problem is that nobody wants to do the legwork," Suprata said. "It's very labor-intensive."

The changing nature of the county may warrant a different look at the refuse collection districts, Ennis said, though she hasn't heard of anything to that effect in the works. "What used to be farmland is now all developed land, so I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that someone might want to take a look at some point and maybe update or re-think this," Ennis said.

For more information about petitioning to be included in county trash collection, visit www

.montgomerycountymd.gov/

recycling, click on "Collection Services," and choose "Change from private to county-provided service" under "Trash Collection." For more information about petitioning for county-provided leaf vacuuming services, e-mail Steven.suprata@

montgomerycountymd.gov.