From Hillcrest to Ivy City to the Palisades, fallen leaves are piling up in the District.

       The city’s Department of Public Works is behind on picking up the leaves that residents rake to their curbs. The city’s original schedule called for leaf pickup trucks to visit every street at least once by Dec. 4, but the department now says it won’t meet that milestone until Sunday — and it can’t foresee how long it will take to visit each street a second time.

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       City leaders say they’re scrambling to bring in more workers who can pick up the leaves. But they have not said why the District is having more trouble this year completing a routine task that the local government is responsible for every autumn.

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       “I think it must be poor management, because they ought to be able to pick up the leaves. And it’s causing lots of problems,” said Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who said she has heard reports of leaves clogging storm drains and serving as kindling for fires that ignite cars parked on top of the leaves. “It creates debris all around. Most importantly, in a psychological sense, it bespeaks the fact that we can’t get basic services done, and that’s never a good message.”

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       Cheh oversees the Department of Public Works as chair of the council’s committee on transportation and the environment. The department’s director told Cheh, “The leaf collection schedule is often disrupted by weather events, personnel changes, or other unforeseen circumstances,” without explaining what specifically has gone wrong this year. Cheh, who said this year’s collection delays seem more severe than problems in the past, quoted the response in her newsletter. Department spokespeople did not respond to inquiries from The Washington Post.

       A map maintained by the department shows that as of Tuesday — 10 days past the original schedule for completing a first pass on every block and a second pass in many neighborhoods, including all of Ward 8 — leaf trucks have visited most neighborhoods once, and scarcely any twice (about four blocks in the entire city).

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       Some neighborhoods have yet to be visited by the leaf trucks, including much of the western corner of the District around Spring Valley, the Crestwood area near Rock Creek Park and a large triangle of Northeast stretching all the way from North Capitol Street to Eastern Avenue.

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       Marie J. Fritz lives in Penn Branch, one of many Ward 7 neighborhoods where leaf trucks have not yet visited most blocks.

       “It’s not as serious as other issues,” Fritz noted in a message to The Post, but she and her neighbors are frustrated that they raked the leaves from Penn Branch’s many trees on time, only to have the city not show up to collect them. “We have so many leaves they usually end up getting piled onto the street. With last week’s windstorm many piles got blown back into yards after residents raked them out on schedule weeks before. Again, it’s minor, but it is just another thing that isn’t working.”

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       D.C. Council members have been fielding calls from residents whose leaves haven’t been picked up. Alex Taliadoros, a spokesman for council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), noted seniors, in particular, are aggrieved — some already hired workers to rake their leaves on time, and then the leaves went uncollected and blew back into their yards, leaving the residents facing the expense of having the same leaves raked twice.

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       Pressed by Lewis George and Cheh, city administrator Kevin Donahue said at a council meeting last week that the Department of Public Works is looking into hiring additional contractors who can help the city’s workforce pick up all the leaves.

       “They have been authorized to work dawn to dusk and exercise as much overtime as their workforce makes available," Donahue said of the city’s regular leaf collectors. But he did not explain at the meeting why all that overtime is necessary this year, when presumably the same volume of leaves fell off the trees as in years before.