Permits

Do You Need a Permit for a Dumpster in New Britain?

The placement answer is usually no. But on the older city lots there is often no private option, and that changes the plan more than the permit does.

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 which office issues it depends on which of a dozen towns you are in.

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 if the property is a rental or a multi-family you do not own outright, the owner's permission is not optional, and on a shared driveway it is worth having in writing.

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 advice everywhere else is to get the container onto private property. Here that advice comes with an asterisk, because on a good number of city lots there genuinely is no private option.

Why street placement comes up more here

New Britain, Hartford, Bristol, Meriden and the older village centres were largely built before cars were a planning consideration. A great 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.

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.

Practical numbers for judging your own frontage: a 20 yard is twenty-two feet of container and the truck needs roughly ten more feet of clear run behind it to roll it off, plus about twenty-two feet of overhead clearance to raise the bed. A 15 yard takes six feet less on the ground.

Multi-family adds a second question

Worth flagging because this city has far more two-family and three-family housing than the suburbs around it.

On a multi-family the questions multiply: who owns the driveway, which unit's tenants park on it, and whether the landlord has agreed. We have had containers ordered by one tenant and objected to by another, which is nobody's idea of a good week.

There is a related City point worth knowing. The municipal bulk pickup programme covers single family and multi-family buildings up to six families. Larger buildings are outside it entirely, so a container is not just the convenient option there — it is the only residential route.

A patchwork of towns and four counties

Our service area spans Hartford, Middlesex, New Haven and Litchfield Counties and more than a dozen separate municipalities. There is no single office that covers it and the rules change at every town line.

Two specific confusions worth heading off:

• Sharing a calendar is not sharing a government. Berlin appears on the same environmental services calendar as New Britain, which leads people to assume the rules travel. They do not — Berlin sets its own ordinances and its own permit process.
• A hauler's address is not your town's rules. Some neighbouring towns run their oversized-item programmes through haulers based at New Britain street addresses. Their fees, limits and collection days are that town's, not ours, in either direction.

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

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 central Connecticut towns take snow removal seriously because they must. On a narrow city street where there is already nowhere for the snow to go, a parked obstruction is a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience.

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 there is no driveway, talk to us early rather than the week before. More on winter placement here.

What we need from you

• Whether the container is going on private property or the street
• Which town — not just "near New Britain"
• Whether the property is single or multi-family, and who owns the driveway
• Your driveway width and length, and 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.