Permits

Do You Need a Permit for a Dumpster in Johnstown?

The placement answer is usually no. But this valley is a patchwork of small boroughs and townships, and the line you are on decides everything.

The short answer

If your dumpster is going on your own driveway or your own private property, you almost certainly do not need a permit. That covers most of the containers we place.

If it has to sit on a public street, you will need one — and in this valley, which office issues it changes every few blocks.

Private property: no permit

A driveway, a private parking area, a fenced construction site, a commercial lot you own or lease — all private property, no municipal permit required for the container itself.

Two caveats that are not placement permits but function like them. The underlying work may need a building permit — roofing, structural, electrical, plumbing and additions generally do. And on the hillside boroughs, your own driveway may not be a practical option because of grade or width, which is a different problem the permit will not solve.

Public street: yes, permit

Placing a container in the street means occupying public space, and every municipality we work in regulates that. The permit exists for emergency access, sight lines, drainage and night-time visibility.

Our honest advice everywhere else is to get the container onto private property. Here that advice comes with an asterisk, because sometimes there genuinely is no private option.

Why street placement comes up more here

In most of the markets we work, street placement is a last resort used a handful of times a year. In the Johnstown valley it comes up regularly, and for structural reasons rather than preference.

The older valley boroughs — Ferndale, East Conemaugh, Franklin, South Fork, the older parts of the city, much of Windber — were laid out for houses without cars. Many properties have no driveway at all, or a driveway reached by a narrow rear alley that a roll-off truck cannot line up in. On the hillside, some driveways are too steep to hold a loaded container safely.

So the sequence we use is: driveway first, then a private lot or a neighbour's arrangement, then the street with a permit. If the answer is going to be the street, we would rather establish that at booking than on the morning, because the permit takes time to obtain.

A patchwork of small municipalities

This is the part that surprises people moving into the area.

The Johnstown urban area is not one city. It is a city surrounded by a dense patchwork of small boroughs and townships, several of them only a few thousand people, each with its own government, its own ordinances and its own collection arrangements.

Practically, that means the one-bulk-item-a-month allowance, the yard waste bundle limits and the City recycling registration apply to City of Johnstown addresses only. Cross a line you cannot see from the street and you are under a different system entirely — Upper Yoder's cart-based arrangement, for instance, works nothing like the City's.

If you are not sure which municipality you are in, your property tax bill is definitive.

Two counties, different arrangements

Our service area also crosses a county line. Most of it is Cambria County, but Windber, Davidsville and Somerset are in Somerset County, with their own county-level disposal arrangements and their own solid waste authority.

For a container on your own property none of that matters. For street permits, and for anything you plan to haul yourself, it does.

Winter makes street placement harder

Worth planning around in this climate.

Between roughly December and March, a container in the street is in the plow's way, and municipalities in the Laurel Highlands take snow removal seriously because they must. On a hillside borough street it is worse than an inconvenience — a parked obstruction on a steep grade that needs cindering is a genuine safety problem.

Expect street placement to be considerably harder to obtain in those months, and expect any permission granted to come with conditions about removal before a storm. Plan on the driveway, and if the driveway will not take it, talk to us early. More on winter placement here.

What we need from you

• Whether the container is going on private property or the street
• Which borough or township — not just "Johnstown"
• How steep the driveway is, and how wide the street is
• Whether access is by a rear alley
• Whether the underlying work is permitted
• Whether there are low branches or overhead lines near the placement

If street placement turns out to be necessary, we will tell you which office to approach. We cannot pull the permit on your behalf — it attaches to the property owner or contractor — but we work across all of these municipalities and can make sure you are asking the right one first time.