Dumpster Rental in Garden City, CO

Roll-off containers for Garden City homes and jobsites

Greeley completely surrounds a separate town, and most people driving through never notice. Garden City is a statutory town of 72 acres and about 254 people — 0.113 square miles — entirely surrounded by the cities of Greeley and Evans. It was incorporated on 2 August 1938, and the reason is a good one: Greeley voters had approved a local option in 1935 making the city dry, and Garden City was incorporated next door as a wet enclave, its founder selling cabin lots for as little as $100 to assemble the landowners incorporation required.

Two governments, one street. And that is not a curiosity — it is the whole reason this page exists, because the moment a job crosses that town line, none of the City of Greeley’s rules follow it. Greeley’s refuse hauler license at § 8-368, Greeley’s Public Space traffic permit for a container in the roadway, Greeley’s adopted 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454, and the Greeley Fire Department’s seven stations are all City of Greeley machinery, and they stop at the City of Greeley’s boundary. A job on one side of a street answers to Greeley. A job on the other answers to Garden City.

So here is the honest position, stated plainly. We did not establish whether Garden City licenses refuse haulers, requires a permit for a container in its right-of-way, has its own dumpster ordinance, has adopted any building or fire code, or which fire district serves it. We also did not find an official town website or phone number, and we are not going to publish one we did not verify. That is not the same as saying there are no rules. A statutory town — which draws its powers from state statute rather than from its own home rule charter — and one of only 72 acres at that, may have very little of this machinery. It may have some. We do not know, and guessing on your behalf would be worse than telling you we do not.

What we do know is the county layer, and it is the same for you as for anyone else in Weld. Weld County administration is at 1150 O Street in Greeley, on (970) 400-4000, with the building department and the right-of-way permit desk at the same address and planning on (970) 400-6100. And Weld County’s household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley is free to every Weld County resident, which a Garden City household is.

The practical version, and it is short: if your address is in Garden City, say so when you call. Do not assume that because the street looks like Greeley and the mail looks like Greeley, the rules are Greeley’s. On 72 acres, the town line is never far away, and it is the single most useful thing you can tell us.

There is one more thing worth knowing about Garden City, and it is a genuinely good piece of local history rather than a filler paragraph. Greeley was founded in 1870 as the Union Colony, a temperance settlement organized by Nathan Meeker, an agricultural journalist, on land near the confluence of the Cache la Poudre and the South Platte. Sixty-five years later, in 1935, Greeley voters approved a local option that made the city dry — and three years after that, a 72-acre town incorporated next door specifically to sell the liquor. The founding principle and the loophole are the same story a lifetime apart, and the town boundary that resulted is still the line that decides whose rules govern your job.

What we know about working in Garden City

Because we could not establish Garden City’s own rules, this section tells you what is certain, what is not, and who to ask.

Certain: the town is its own government. Garden City is a statutory town in Weld County, incorporated in 1938, and it is not part of the City of Greeley or the City of Evans in any legal sense — it is merely surrounded by them. Nothing in Greeley’s municipal code has any application inside it. That includes the hauler licensing chapter at Title 8, Chapter 11, the Public Space permitting document that names dumpsters, the 2021 IFC adoption at § 22-454, the 2021 IBC at § 22-31 and the 2021 IRC at § 22-76, and the refuse and litter provisions at § 12-269. All of those are the City of Greeley’s and they apply inside the Greeley city limits. Read them for yourself in the Greeley municipal code if you want to see what a fully built-out municipal regime looks like — then remember that it is not yours.

Not established, and we will not guess: whether Garden City requires a permit or written permission to place a container in a town street, alley or right-of-way; whether it licenses or franchises refuse haulers; whether it has adopted a building code or a fire code, and which edition; and which fire protection district responds there. We found no official town website or published phone number and we are not going to invent one. The right move is to ask locally before you plan around a street placement. For anything county-level, Weld County on (970) 400-4000 is the switchboard, and Planning and Development Services is (970) 400-6100.

What does not change wherever you are. On private property — your own driveway, yard, lot or parking area — a right-of-way permit is not in play anywhere, because a right-of-way permit is about the public right-of-way. That covers the great majority of what we set, in Garden City as everywhere else. And the fire separation for a container is five feet from a combustible wall in every edition of the International Fire Code in use in this region, so even without knowing which edition applies here, five feet is the number to work to and it is the number we work to.

State and federal rules apply to you exactly as they apply in Greeley. Electronics have been banned from Colorado landfills since 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. Waste tires move through registered channels only, and no person may transport ten or more without state registration. Lead: the pre-1978 federal renovation rule is triggered by compensated work disturbing paint, and because Colorado is not EPA-authorized for that program, firms certify with the EPA directly. Asbestos: CDPHE Regulation 8, Part B treats it as air quality, with single-family triggers at 32 square feet, 50 linear feet or a 55-gallon drum, 10 working days’ notification, a $60 notice and a $180 single-family permit, and exemption only for buildings after 12 October 1988 — 720-507-5136. Colorado 811 requires two business days’ notice before digging under C.R.S. § 9-1.5-103, with white-lining first; CO811 advises three. 811 or 800-922-1987.

And the county services are yours. The household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley is free to every Weld County resident, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217 — paint, solvents, thinners, pesticides, pool chemicals and automotive fluids, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing over five gallons, nothing leaking, nothing in plastic bags, and no electronics and no appliances. One thing that is not yours: the Greeley Annual Spring Clean-Up is open to City of Greeley residents only, with photo ID. A Garden City address is not a City of Greeley address, and 72 acres is a very easy place to be caught out by that.

• RegionWeld County
• Distance from our yardA separate town completely surrounded by Greeley and Evans, minutes from the yard
• Main routesUS 85 Business through the south side of Greeley
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Garden City is about as short a run as we make — the Greeley grid brings us to the edge of it from any direction and the whole town is a few blocks across. The delivery questions are the ordinary ones for older, tightly-platted ground: how wide the drive is, what the apron is made of, what is overhead, and whether the approach turns. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach, about eleven feet of working width and better than twenty feet of clear overhead so the hoist can stand the box up off the rails; a 15 forgives a tight lot noticeably more. On commercial frontage the parking area is usually the answer and it is private ground, which keeps the permit question out of it entirely. The one thing we will ask that we would not ask two streets away is simply which side of the town line you are on, because it decides who you call about a street placement and we would rather know before the truck is loaded than after. Older aprons and patched asphalt get plywood as standard. Tell us the surface, the grade, the overhead and the finish date, and we will book the set and the pull together. (970) 888-6911.

Routes we run: US 85 Business through the south side of Greeley, 8th Avenue south out of Greeley, the Greeley street grid, which runs right up to the town line on every side, US 34 across the south of the city, the Evans side approaches from the south.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Garden City

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. In Garden City the answer is short and it is not Greeley. Garden City is a statutory town lying wholly inside Weld County, with its own government, and that government is not the City of Greeley’s. It is also the smallest place on this site by a wide margin: 0.113 square miles — 72 acres — and about 254 people, completely surrounded by the cities of Greeley and Evans, incorporated on 2 August 1938. Two governments, one street. On 72 acres the town line is never far away, and which side of it you are on is the single most useful thing you can tell us when you call. One town, one county, one county seat — the county part of the answer is the same as it is everywhere else on this site, because all seventeen places we serve are in Weld. It is the municipal part that changes at the town line, and it changes completely.

Here is why that is worth a paragraph rather than a footnote. A home rule municipality takes its powers from a charter of its own under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution, and on local matters may legislate past what state statute lays down. A statutory town works from the statute alone. Greeley is home rule and is the fullest expression of what that permits: it licenses refuse haulers at § 8-368, declares itself the sole agency for refuse collection through city-licensed operators at § 8-371, names dumpsters directly in its own Public Space permitting rules, regulates containers on the right-of-way at § 12-269, and adopts the 2021 fire, building and residential codes at §§ 22-454, 22-31 and 22-76. Every one of those is City of Greeley machinery and every one of them stops at the City of Greeley’s boundary. We list them here precisely so you can see what does not apply to a Garden City address. Read them in the Greeley municipal code if you want to see what a fully built-out municipal regime looks like — then remember it is not yours.

And now the honest part. We did not establish whether Garden City licenses or franchises refuse haulers, whether it requires a permit or written permission for a container in its street, alley or right-of-way, whether it has a dumpster ordinance of its own, which fire protection district responds there, or which editions of the building and fire codes it has adopted. Not one of those. That is five open questions and we would rather hand you five than answer them from memory, because a confident wrong answer about another government’s rules is the worst thing a page like this can do. “We could not find one” is not the same sentence as “there is none.” The research behind this page did not establish a phone number for Garden City that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns is aggregator listings rather than the town’s own page, and a wrong number printed confidently is worse than no number at all — so take these questions to the town clerk directly. Outside the town limits the county takes over, and there the answer is the same for everyone on this site. Greeley is the county seat, and that is not a ceremonial fact. Weld County administration, the county building department and the county right-of-way permit desk are all at 1150 O Street in Greeley on (970) 400-4000, with Planning and Development Services on (970) 400-6100. Weld County is 3,984.94 square miles and 378,426 people, and every county permit counter that touches a construction job anywhere in it is here. A contractor working out at Briggsdale or Keenesburg sorts the paperwork in Greeley.

Now the part most of our competitors skip. Start with the line that is safe everywhere, because it is the one that covers nearly every job: private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — engages no right-of-way permit at all. Neither the town’s nor the county’s, anywhere in this service area. On your own driveway in Garden City the constraints we know of are the fire clearance, your covenants, a landlord’s consent and whether the approach will carry a loaded truck — and the driveway is where we would rather set the box in any case.

If any part of the container will stand in the street, the alley, the sidewalk or the verge, that is right-of-way, and inside an incorporated place the right-of-way belongs to the municipality rather than to the county. Garden City is that municipality, and we did not read Garden City’s code. We will not print a Garden City fee, tier, form or turnaround that we have not read. What we can show you is what the sequence looks like where it is written down, so you know what you are asking for. In Greeley the City’s own permitting guidance says “placement of dumpsters within the Public Space and roadways requires Public Space Traffic permits and proper signage,” issued by Public Works Permits at 2835 W. 10th Street; and § 12-269(a) separately allows a household trash container on the right-of-way for one 24-hour period in seven days, which is a curbside rule and not a roll-off pass. That is the City of Greeley’s paperwork and it stops at the City of Greeley’s boundary. Different government, different paperwork, same truck. Ask the Garden City town clerk before you plan around a street placement rather than after — and ask them, not us, because it is their street. Outside the town limits the desk is Weld County Public Works, at 1150 O Street in Greeley, on (970) 400-4000. And permission or no permission, ring Colorado 811 before anything at all is dug, trenched, driven or pulled out of the ground.

One rule belongs to the driveway itself, and it is a fire rule. Section 304.3 of the International Fire Code provides that a dumpster must not be stored inside a building and must not be placed within five feet of a combustible wall. There is a threshold in that section expressed in cubic yards, and it does not matter here: every roll-off we run is far over it — even a 10 yard is ten cubic yards — so the five-foot rule applies to all of them, always. The debate you will find on the internet about which subsection and which capacity is academic; say five feet and stop. Measure it from the nearest combustible surface rather than from the wall plane, because on a Garden City lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard the eave line is what actually decides where the box can sit, and we take that measurement before the rails come off the truck. Two more rules from the same section are worth having on a working site: containers over forty gallons need lids, and materials liable to spontaneous ignition — oily rags, stain and sealant-soaked cloths — belong in a listed disposal container rather than loose in a roll-off. That is a real jobsite fire cause, not a paper rule. Which fire authority covers a Garden City address, and which edition it enforces, we did not establish and we will not characterize it. That authority — not the county switchboard and certainly not Greeley’s fire department — is the desk to ask, and fire district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries. The five feet is the part that does not vary, so work to it while you find out the rest.

Last, the run in. Getting a box off the rails cleanly wants roughly 60 feet of straight, about 11 feet of width and 20-plus feet of nothing overhead. In Garden City what fails that test is hardly ever the road. It is the final hundred feet of it. Nothing in this county is mountain driving — Greeley stands at 4,676 feet where the Cache la Poudre joins the South Platte, and a truck works a numbered grid in town and a section-line grid outside it — so the obstacles are small, local and entirely predictable once somebody has looked. On the old platted blocks: a service drop slung low over the only way in, a shade tree that has had sixty years to spread, a lot too narrow to swing on, an alley wanting the carts moved and the gate unlocked before we arrive. On the newer western ground: turf laid last month, an irrigation line run shallow alongside the drive, a street sitting on base course and waiting for its top lift. Out on acreage: a quarter mile of lane that has carried a pickup all winter and will cut up under nine tons in April. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you found.

Two questions follow the load rather than the address, and neither is settled at a town hall. The first is what the box is allowed to carry. CDPHE writes the solid waste rules at 6 CCR 1007-2, but the instrument that lets a disposal site exist at all is a county one: a certificate of designation under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, issued by the governing body with jurisdiction and reviewed by the state. Here that governing body is Weld, and the building it works out of is 1150 O Street in Greeley. Past a short list of statutory bans there is no master schedule of refused materials in this state — every facility writes its own into an approved operating plan. Which is why we ask what is going in the box while we are quoting it, rather than finding out when the ticket comes back.

The bans are brief and two of them trip people up. Electronics have been shut out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303, so a television, a monitor or a tower needs a recycler — and the county hazardous waste counter will not take them either, which is the surprise we field most often. Waste tires are refused at the gate, and moving ten or more of them takes a state registration, so they never travel with us. Green material runs the opposite way: Colorado has never put a statewide landfill ban on yard waste, and the gates serving this county list branches and vegetation among what they accept. We still keep it in its own load, for money rather than law. The City’s GROW Center on 970-673-3718 takes grass, leaves, plants, limbs, branches and untreated lumber, though anything painted, stained or nailed together stopped being clean wood the day it went up, and A-1 Organics composts at Eaton on 970-454-3492. Everything wet or reactive — paint, solvent, fuel, automotive fluid, a battery, a propane cylinder, pool chemicals — has somewhere free to go three days a week at 1311 North 17th Avenue here in Greeley, on (970) 400-2217.

Asbestos is where we stop, and there is no version of the job where we do not. Nothing containing it rides in one of our containers. Colorado files it under air quality rather than waste, which catches out anyone who has worked in another state: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division administers it under Regulation 8, Part B. On a single-family house the thresholds are 50 linear feet of pipe covering, 32 square feet of anything else, or a 55-gallon drum by volume; a certified inspector goes in first; the notice period is ten working days; the published fees are $60 for a notice and $180 for a thirty-day permit; and a demolition has to be notified whatever the quantity turns out to be. Anything built after 12 October 1988 is exempt where the documentation shows no asbestos-containing material was used. The line is 720-507-5136. None of that is ours to file — but every bit of it sits in front of the container, and a job halted by an inspector costs a great deal more than a week of waiting for one.

The other year to know is 1978, the cut-off for the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, and Colorado handles it backwards compared with most of the country: the state never took the program over, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA itself. Whether that matters at all depends on where you are standing, and standing here it matters constantly, because close to half of Greeley predates the rule. The median house went up in 1985, roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980, and 7.2 percent of it was already standing in 1939. That is the reason our guide to lead and asbestos in older Greeley homes sits on the front page of this site instead of at the bottom of it. One last item, and it is the one people skip. Ring Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987 before a shovel goes anywhere. C.R.S. § 9-1.5-103 puts the notice at two business days, not counting the day you give it; Colorado 811 asks for three; take the three and you cannot be caught short. Mark the dig in white before you call. Setting a box on a driveway triggers none of this. A footing, a fence line, a stump or a sewer lateral triggers all of it.

What the box stands on settles more arguments in Garden City than what size it is, and nearly every habit carried in from a rainier part of the country is the wrong habit here. Greeley sits at 4,676 feet on flat irrigated plain, and the 1991–2020 normal at Greeley–Weld County Airport — our own station, not a borrowed one from down the range — is 15.34 inches of precipitation in a year. What happens below the surface at your particular address is not something we will publish. That takes a geotechnical investigation, and guessing at it in print helps nobody. What is public, regional and genuinely useful is that the Colorado Geological Survey maps a potentially swelling-clay corridor running from Fort Collins and Greeley in the north to Pueblo and Cañon City in the south, with this city at the northern end of it, and clays of that sort can take up a great deal of water. The part we actually work with is the top few inches. Several tons ride on four small pads under a loaded container. Dry, this ground carries them without complaint. Come back after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a thaw and it will take an impression and keep it. Hence the one rule we never bend: concrete rather than turf, mats under every wheel and both rails, on every drop, in every month of the year — and after a wet week we would sooner move a date than cut up two hundred feet of somebody’s drive.

The houses were built for that climate, and they have a floor below grade. Table R301.2(1) of the residential code Greeley adopted publishes a 30-inch frost line, and the county publishes the same number, so footings, water services and sewer laterals all begin below it. A trench that would be trivial in a warm state is a real excavation here, and trench spoil is the heaviest material that comes off a house. That makes a footing repair or a lateral replacement a 10 yard loaded low conversation and never a 20 yard one. Where it changes a cleanout is the stairs, because hand-carrying is the job: a smaller box set close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked wherever suited the truck. Two dates belong in the same breath, since they decide when outdoor work can start at all — the average last spring frost is 12 May and the first fall frost is 8 October. And because it comes up whenever a lower level is opened up: on radon we quote EPA rather than a map, and EPA’s position is that elevated readings have turned up in every zone it draws, so “all homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The age of the housing splits this market in half, and it is the half nobody expects who knows northern Colorado only from the newer corridor towns. The median Greeley home dates from 1985. Roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980 and 7.2 percent of it was standing before 1940, while 39.1 percent of households here rent, against 22.1 percent across the county. So: an old city sitting inside the fastest-growing county in the state. 115,073 people on 49.09 square miles, incorporated 15 November 1885 out of the 1870 Union Colony, at the middle of a Weld County of 378,426 that turns out over 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas and $2.38 billion of agricultural product a year. Those figures are Census. Translated into containers it means two different loads on the same street: one is plaster, cast iron, pre-1978 paint and a third covering of shingle, the other is new-build tidy-up and a first remodel. The older one weighs considerably more, and it is the one we get called for.

Then the weather, where one hazard outranks the rest of the list put together. Hail is what pays for containers in this county. Northeastern Colorado runs seven to nine hail days a year inside the most hail-prone corridor in the United States, and the work never spreads itself out. It lands in one week, after one storm, with every roofer in Weld dialing the same numbers before eight in the morning. If your roof has just been hit, book it that day — and know that on a Greeley roof there is a sizing consequence attached, because a second course of asphalt still on the deck reaches lawful payload while the box still looks part used. Wind is second, and it is the one that damages property. Chinook downslope events come off the range hard enough to have produced recorded Front Range gusts of 137 mph, and the county publishes a residential design wind of 115 mph. A county does not write a figure like that down for decoration. An empty box walks, a heaped one redistributes itself along the street, and a loose tarp is a kite — so we weight whatever we cover, and we would rather tuck a container behind a windbreak than leave it standing in the open. Third, tornadoes: Weld has recorded more of them than any county in the United States, most of them short-lived landspouts on the Denver convergence zone, most of them on afternoons that looked unremarkable from the ground. Warnings come out of NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. A container left open through a real storm fills with water and grit, and you then pay us by the ton to carry it away. Cover it, or ask us for a tarp.

And there is one more calendar worth planning around here that no other market in this county has. Every May, three things land in the same fortnight. The last frost lifts around 12 May, so outdoor demolition and landscaping start. The university’s academic year ends in early May and leases turn over in a city that is 39.1 percent renter-occupied. And the City runs its two-day Spring Clean-Up, the one that refuses construction and demolition debris and turns away bagged loads. We do not publish a statistic about it, because there is not an honest one to publish — but that is the shape of the Greeley year, it is the busiest fortnight we have, and the practical advice is simply to book earlier in the first half of May than you think you need to. The other end of that cycle is mid-August. Our guide to move-out and rental turnover is written for landlords and property managers who live with both ends of it.

Collection in Garden City is the town’s own business on its own limits. It is not Weld County’s and it is emphatically not Greeley’s, and we are not going to publish Garden City’s cart rules, bulky-item rules or collection day from memory. That one is for the Garden City town clerk as well. One thing we can tell you with confidence: the City of Greeley’s Annual Spring Clean-Up is for Greeley residents with photo ID, so it is not a route for a Garden City address — and in any case its own published list refuses “construction or demolition debris,” which is what most of our customers actually have. One thing holds true across the whole of this market, and it is the part that concerns us: no cart program anywhere in it was ever designed for construction and demolition debris. Shingle, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete and framing lumber are ours to deal with, whichever side of a municipal line the house happens to stand on.

Beneath the town sits the county, and that layer catches out anybody who arrived from a place with a weekly truck. Weld County collects no residential waste anywhere in the county. Whatever Garden City does or does not provide inside its own limits is the Garden City government’s business, and the county layer underneath it does not collect from anybody. What the county runs instead is drop-off. Weld County runs a household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley — free to every Weld County resident, open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in a container over five gallons, nothing leaking and nothing in a plastic bag. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there, so those need a route of their own. Paint, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals and automotive fluids cannot go in a roll-off, and this is where they go instead. The county also publishes a seasonal landfill voucher, one per Weld County address, for a single load. Every one of the seventeen places on this site is in Weld County, so both of those are open to every customer we have — which is a genuinely useful thing about working in one county instead of two. None of it is a curbside service and none of it takes job debris. From there, two things travel with the load rather than with the address. Where it ends up is the first — a facility permitted to receive that class of waste, and a concrete tear-out does not go to the same gate as a roof. What it weighs is the second, since disposal is billed by weight, which is precisely why the question about contents comes before the quote and not after it. Your half of that is being straight with us about whether the load is light and bulky or heavy and dense, because that is the difference between one haul and two. The rest is in construction debris disposal in Weld County.

Sizes we deliver to Garden City