225BatonRouge.com

It’s not the traffic that irks John Fabre each morning on his 40-mile trek from his home in St. Francisville to his office on Airline Highway in South Baton Rouge.

It’s the trash.

The highway is littered with cigarette butts, fast-food bags, empty bottles, aluminum cans and plastic bags.

“The whole city is a mess,” says Fabre, the general manager at Acura/Infiniti of Baton Rouge. “I’ve always complained about this, but it never seems to do any good. If you look at any intersection, it’s not just trash—the grass isn’t even mowed, and name me one intersection in this city that doesn’t have a mountain of cigarette butts. It’s disgusting.” Fabre’s ire, 225 has learned, is common. Readers consistently tell us they are sick of the trash and litter strewn across the parish.

And you know what?

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. And so should we.

Trash is not something the government fixes or solves alone. It’s up to the half a million people living in the metro area. Trash is our shared problem.

Gwen Emick, executive director of Keep Baton Rouge Beautiful, has traveled the country as an ambassador for her organization learning about what other communities are doing in the fight against litter. She often finds herself embarrassed when asked what’s being done in her own community.

“When I see what they’re doing, I start to think about Louisiana,” she says. “Why can’t we be cleaner? Why are we throwing trash out the window? It really amounts to us throwing money out the window. We are a joke everywhere else.”

Like Fabre, Emick is tired of the excuse. Let the inmates pick it up. Let the government take care of it. And an all-time fave: Aren’t there people whose job it is to clean things up?

“People think it’s free,” she says. “It’s not free. It costs money to get those inmates out there, to transport them, to feed them, to guard them. Everyone has this perception that it’s the government’s responsibility, and it’s not. It’s our responsibility. Don’t blame the fast-food places—it’s not their fault. It’s their customers’ fault.”

The Baton Rouge Area Chamber has identified litter as a significant quality-of-life issue and has formed a commission to educate the public on litter law and responsibility.

“It’s about taking pride and being invested in your community,” says Stephen Moret, BRAC president and CEO. “A small number of people are junking up our city. They really ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

Nancy Roberts, the founder and executive director of the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators, has helped with numerous Rotary Club litter pick-ups, spending hours of her free time picking up litter only to see it replaced with fresh trash.

“It’s extremely discouraging,” Roberts says. “I’ve spoken to some Rotarians, and these days, no one wants to do cleanups anymore. What a waste! You spend your whole day cleaning up just to see the trash come back.”

Where is trash the worst in Baton Rouge?

Emick has identified North Baton Rouge as one of the worst offenders. Most of the residents in the area are renters who remain unconcerned about litter because it’s not their property.

“You’re going to find that typically this occurs in lower-income neighborhoods,” she says. “But they have other issues to worry about, like putting food on the table and putting a roof over their heads.”

Also, we asked readers of our sister online publication, Daily Report, to identify their most-loathed litter trouble spots. We received dozens of e-mails that spread the blame all over the parish, from low-income neighborhoods to exclusive streets—from the Garden District to Highland Road to Beauregard Town.

There is a common mindset: Someone else will simply clean up the mess. Even tailgaters at LSU gameday are to blame. The university’s department of facility services puts out some 3,500 bright yellow trash cans, plus another 1,500 recycling bins. But fans are too busy partying to fill them, so come Sunday morning, crews retrieving the cans also must pick up vast amounts of trash on the ground.

“Even after putting all of those cans out we still find trash on the ground,” says Andres Harris, facility services solid waste and recycling manager. “People let them overflow, and it takes time to pick all that up. We find a lot that people are misusing the recycling bins. We always find food and trash in them. We try to sort through it and separate the things that can be recycled from the trash, but because of the lack of time, sometimes we just can’t.”

The news is not all bad, however.

In June, the Louisiana Federation of Garden Clubs presented Baton Rouge with its Cleanest City Award, chosen from a group of Louisiana cities of similar size and population. Last year’s winner was Lafayette.

Chairman JoAnn Fryling, a member of the Baton Rouge Garden Club, scolded the local media for failing to report that Baton Rouge had won the honor. Turns out the judges were led on tours along an appointed route through the city, and it happened to coincide with the Black Mayors conference when the city was on its game and trying to impress its visitors.

“It’s certainly a great thing for Baton Rouge to win this honor,” Fryling says. “Could we do more? Sure, I think we could do a lot more. We need to get everyone on the bandwagon. For me, litter goes against everything my momma taught me.”

All-out war

Crucial to cleaning up the city is a commitment from the boss—in our case, the mayor. Mayor Kip Holden announced in March he’s adopting a warlike stance on litterbugs.

With a fleet of street sweepers behind him like soldiers armed and ready to fight for their king, the mayor outlined a comprehensive plan of attack that includes inmate labor, strict litter law enforcement and prosecution for offenders, and weekly maintenance during the almost never-ending Louisiana growing season.

“In perhaps the largest effort ever made to clean the streets and roads of East Baton Rouge Parish, our 2007 budget includes more than $1 million in funding to hire 145 seasonal workers to help address litter pick-up, clean drainage canals and do street repair,” Holden says. “We have been working to put together funding, equipment, a work force and an enforcement arm that could be kicked off at the same time to finally make our cleanup activities effective.”

Although he’s had to slightly scale back his original plan, it has all the makings of a step in the right direction—assuming the city-parish follows through. Holden also announced in March a contract on the table requesting 30 inmates from Dixon Correctional Institute to pick up litter around the parish for 40 hours per week for one year slated to begin June 1. But the Metro Council would only approve the use of 12 inmates. Their primary duties, which began in late July, include picking up litter, as well as cutting and spraying weeds along the interstates, according to Public Works Director Pete Newkirk. The cost to the city? $50,000 a year for three years.

Newkirk says DPW has 20 regular employees and 10 seasonal employees assigned to the department’s landscaping/boulevard crew, and it recently interviewed to fill five vacant maintenance positions. Newkirk also has asked that five positions be added to the work force in the 2008 budget to increase manpower by 17%.

In another first-time move by the folks at DPW, the department has contracted out grass-cutting and maintenance at 29 city-parish facilities and on 17 boulevards. The contracts for the facilities provide twice-monthly maintenance during the growing season and monthly maintenance during the winter, at an annual cost of $72,800. The contracts for the boulevards provide weekly maintenance during the growing season and bi-weekly during the winter, for an annual cost of $406,076. That should be good news for the folks on Corporate Boulevard, who have complained bitterly about un-mown public spaces.

“Having these facilities and boulevards under contract maintenance, we will have reduced the number of our maintenance sites from 85 locations to 42,” Newkirk says. “Residents should start to see a noticeable difference.”

Newkirk said his department also is working on a Web site detailing mowing schedules and areas slated for cleanup so residents can see what’s going on. He hopes to include a public comment section for residents to critique operations and offer suggestions. The site should be operational by Jan. 1.

Holden promises to keep litter a top priority.

“It’s our city, it’s our parish—we have to take more pride in it. We have to treat the city as if we had company coming over. If you have company coming over at your house, you make sure things are picked up and neat. If we did that with our city 365 days a year, we wouldn’t have a problem. People must respect this city. Would you throw trash all over your house? No—so why would you do that to your city?”

And in a tough new stance, the city-parish Attorneys’ Office is taking a tougher line on trash, Holden says, establishing a zero-tolerance policy aimed at litterbugs. “There will be no mercy in our courts when those tickets start coming in.”

To see how another city attacked trash, click here.