Residents would have to pay the city to take away sofas, refrigerators and other bulky trash from their curbside, under a bill scheduled to get its first airing before the Hono­lulu City Council on Wednesday.

Bill 41 calls for a pilot proj­ect setting aside, for a 12-month period, the city’s current bulky-item pickup policy where Department of Environmental Services trucks visit each Oahu neighborhood on scheduled days once a month.

Instead, property owners would have to contact the city to arrange for a bulky-item pickup and then have to pay for the visit. Councilwoman Ann Koba­ya­shi said she introduced the bill after hearing suggestions from Mayor Kirk Caldwell and environmental services officials.

Kobayashi said she’s leaving it up to the administration to determine what the fee should be, but believes it should be nominal so people aren’t discouraged from calling for the service.

She acknowledged one concern with the bill is that people may want to save money by putting their bulky items in front of neighbor’s houses that already have items on their sidewalk. "That’s why it’s a one-year demonstration proj­ect. Let’s see how it works," she said. "It can’t be any worse than the way it is now. There’s just piles of stuff, especially in rental areas like McCully and Salt Lake. When people move out, they just put stuff outside instead of waiting until 24 hours before the pickup."

Caldwell spokes­man Jesse Broder Van Dyke said the mayor supports the concept of fees for service "to avoid raising property taxes on average homeowners" but wants to review the details of the plan before formally supporting Koba­ya­shi’s bill.

Last year Caldwell’s plan to charge property owners for general curbside trash pickup was quickly shot down by the Council. "Hono­lulu is the only Hawaii county and one of the few in the nation that provides free trash pickup," Broder Van Dyke said Tuesday.

A 2010 law allowed city officials to fine property owners $250 for placing bulky items on the sidewalk earlier than the evening before a scheduled monthly pickup. Inspectors are supposed to cite a violation first and then issue fines on subsequent visits.

The city Tuesday could not produce statistics showing how many citations and fines have been issued since the law took effect.

The heads of the neighborhood boards in Salt Lake and McCully-Moiliili had split views of the current situation and the new proposal.

Ron Lockwood, chairman of the McCully/Moiliili Neighborhood Board, said he’s already hearing concerns from people in the community worried that the new bill will lead to their being forced to pay for the illegal dumping of trash on their properties.

Lockwood said he believes no one has been fined for illegal bulky-item pickup despite the hiring of three new inspectors in 2010 to deal with the issue.

Dennis Egge, chairman of the Alia­manu/Salt Lake/Foster Village Neighborhood Board, said there are still piles of bulky items appearing in his high-rise neighborhood but that the situation has improved in recent years. But that’s come only after hard work by the city educating, and citing, people in his neighborhood, he said. He noted also that he has followed the advice of city officials to call when bulky items appear in front of properties far in advance of their scheduled pickup days.

Egge said he supports Koba­ya­shi’s bill because he believes it would provide more resources for the city to deal with the problem. In fact, he suggested that all taxpayers be charged a monthly fee for the service so property owners won’t have any reason to drop bulky items in front of another’s property.