Local neighborhood takes action against litter

Published 4:50 pm Friday, July 1, 2016

Littering is something that every neighborhood wishes to avoid, but it is a stark reality with which the residents around Valentine Road in eastern Baldwin County have recently had to live. Several months ago, neighborhood residents began noticing a considerable uptick in the amount of trash on their streets: cans, bottles, fast food bags, and all manner of discarded items were running roughshod over their once-tidy community. The amount of trash began growing over the course of weeks at an alarming rate.

“I put on some gloves one day and just started walking … you pick up trash one day and then you come back in the next day or two and the same thing is going on again,” said neighborhood resident Earnest Jones. “People just get to a point where they feel so comfortable in the area they think no one is noticing.”

Upon seeing the rate at which garbage was being thrown on his streets and the damage that garbage was doing to the community, Jones spearheaded an effort to clean up the trash that had beset his neighborhood. Since then nearly a dozen neighborhood residents have taken to the streets to combat the spread of garbage, picking up garbage and debris near their homes in an attempt to improve the state of their community.

“It’s more of a neighborhood-community thing,” said Jones. “The people on Valentine, we work as a group to try and pick up paper in our area and some of the other areas as well. If we see kids or someone throwing trash we sort of ask them if they would throw it in the garbage can.”

While the problem of trash on the streets and around people’s homes presented many headaches to homeowners in the small community, the hardest hit spot has been an empty cul-de-sac at the bottom of a steep neighborhood hill. Residents say the trash is generated by people from outside the neighborhood who are drawn to the clearing’s quiet and tucked away location.

“Starting on Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, people throw beer cans, bottles, going to McDonald’s and throwing the boxes and paper … People from outside areas were coming through and throwing it out, and it was getting pretty terrible,” Jones said.

“It’s so secluded back here the law doesn’t have to come back here,” said longtime resident Maurice Walker. “Anywhere the law doesn’t have to come and people can hang around, they will. That’s going to be in that bottom over there, where all the trash is.”

The prognosis for the community has improved somewhat in recent weeks, however, by way of the Keep Milledgeville-Baldwin Beautiful project. After Jones attended one of the group’s board meetings to voice his concern over the amount of trash in his community, the group made plans to hold its inaugural Second Saturday Sweep event in the neighborhood. Volunteers from through Milledgeville and Baldwin County are invited to help clean trash away from places that need it most, in his neighborhood.

“I wish that every street, every residential area, every community, would have those types of people like Mr. Jones step forth,” KMBB executive director Ashley Bacon. “We know they’re there, we know they care, but they don’t step forth and let their voice be heard, so hopefully this story with Mr. Jones opens the eyes of some people in town, that they can speak up and their voice be heard and a difference be made.”

Although neighborhood residents faced what at one time seemed to be a river of trash, the community around Lover’s Lane has actually become cleaner despite it.  A drive around the surrounding streets today reveals a quiet, well-kept neighborhood, largely devoid of its former plastic scourge. It would seem that Jones and his neighbors’ campaign to rid their community of garbage has paid off in a big way, enacted a marked aesthetic change to the neighborhood and provided its residents with a tangible sense of resolve.

“We all pick up the trash around here,” said Walker. “I would say we need to make a schedule for everyone, but it’s so clean out here now, we really don’t have to make a schedule. Everybody just does it.

“They’ve done a remarkable job picking up all the trash in the neighborhood,” Jones said of his team. “Maybe that’s what happens when people see even one or two people going out of their way to pick stuff up.”

The first-ever Keep Milledgeville-Baldwin Beautiful Second Saturday Sweep will be held from 8:15 to 10 a.m. Saturday, July 9 on Lover’s Lane off Highway 24, and is open to the public.