Medford’s plan to cut trash collection in half is generating a stench that has turned the Greater Boston city into a national “laughingstock,” according to city councilors who are rebutting the mayor’s claim that they approved the rollback.

Turmoil has erupted after Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn and other officials announced that the city is prepared to implement biweekly waste collection in July 2027, with the rollback surfacing in national and international headlines after the Herald first reported on the plan.

Comedian Seth Meyers has even picked up on the controversy.

“The mayor of Medford, Massachusetts, recently announced a new waste removal program, which will reduce trash pickups to once every two weeks, but it’s Massachusetts,” Meyers said Tuesday on his late-night show on NBC, “so bottle recycling is still every day.”

Lungo-Koehn is responding to the uproar.

On Wednesday afternoon, the mayor posted a video on social media, looking to “calm some fears and some anger” over a trash contract that institutes the biweekly trash pickup, a move she said the city’s solid waste task force recommended in 2022.

Lungo-Koehn then claimed that officials “publicly” presented the contract before the City Council approved it in July 2023.

“The contract we signed does have us collecting trash every other week,” the mayor said, “but not until July 1, 2027. So that’s over 19 months away with plenty of time for us to talk about it and make adjustments.”

City Council President Zac Bears and Councilor Justin Tseng quickly responded to the mayor’s video, arguing that the council never approved a specific contract, but rather, authorized Lungo-Koehn to enter into one.

“I’m also disappointed by the Mayor’s continued attempts to pass the buck and point fingers at the City Council to shift blame for this decision,” Bears stated in a social media post. “To be clear, … only the Mayor has the legal authority to change course.”

In a separate post, Tseng vowed that he remains “committed to a Medford that tackles climate change with the community … not as a laughingstock on national TV.” The councilor added that the council’s vote in July 2023 was required by state procurement law, “allowing the Mayor to negotiate a 10-year waste contract.”

“As our official meeting record states,” Tseng wrote, “this was not a vote on any specific contract, and the Council first learned of the administration’s final decision at the same time many of you did: through paragraph 11 of a press release.”

The City Council and residents are taking exception to how Lungo-Koehn and officials formally announced the scale-back from the current weekly trash collection.

Officials issued a press release on Nov. 13 highlighting how the city secured a $200,000 grant from the state Department of Environmental Protection to support its so-called “zero waste” initiatives.

The release covered how the grant is the second that the state DEP has issued to the city to purchase curbside organics collection carts. In 2024, the state helped launch Medford’s residential compost collection program with an initial award.

“We were deciding how to be transparent about this and hadn’t discussed this since 2023 publicly,” Lungo-Koehn said in her video. “So, although I wanted to do it sooner than later, we probably should have separated it from the release that went out with the good news about the $200,000 grant. I do take responsibility for that.”

Under the new service, residential 64-gallon trash carts will be collected every other week, along with recycling at no charge, beginning in July 2027. Officials say the baseline will “equate to 32 gallons per household per week.” Residents could continue to lease additional 64-gallon trash and 96-gallon recycling carts.

That service volume, officials say, meets the state’s criteria for the DEP’s “Pay As You Throw” program, making the city eligible for the grants.

Moving to a biweekly collection would save the city over $1 million per year at a time when disposal costs are rising, officials have stressed.

The city has scheduled community meetings in December and January to discuss the plan.

“Whether you think this change is a bad idea, no matter what, or potentially has some merits,” Bears, the City Council president, said, “the fact that Medford’s trash removal policy has gotten so much negative attention in national and local news and was joked about on national broadcast TV … is a colossal communications failure and undermines the trust of residents.”

Trash and recycling bins line the curb in Medford as the city debates a proposal to scale back collection services. (Libby O’Neill/Boston Herald)