A Cleaner Kansas
Antonia Felix
Friday, October 2, 2009
Emporia Clean Sweep squares off for its third weekend today, with free trash drop-off sites for residents of “Zone 3” (southeast-central Emporia) at the Peter Pan Park ball diamonds and Fremont Park (300 block of Union Street).
With the exception of some runaway balloons, the event has reached the halfway point as a rousing success.
Over the past two weekends, Emporians have relieved their yards and porches of more than 240 tons of trash including brush, construction debris, 22 tons of tires, 4 tons of paint, and nearly 5.5 tons of TVs, computer monitors and other electronic waste.
That’s a mountain of trash.
So far, 122 volunteers have made it all happen by clocking 630 hours over four days. Our hats go off to each and every one of them.
Squeaky, the project mascot, has helped get the word out by entertaining kids in the schools and handing out flyers at local events. Thank you, school principals, who have organized those assemblies.
Clean Sweep is a green sweep: all those tires and electronic equipment will be recycled. The paint that is still fit to use is available free for anyone who needs it at the Lyon County Hazardous Waste Facility, 3000 W. South Ave.
Emporia is not the only city with clean fever.
Topeka wrapped up another annual cleanup last spring called Project Takeover/Makeover, which took place on two Saturdays. Residents of 19 neighborhoods were notified by letter in advance of the dates and invited to pull all their trash to the curb on Friday night for pickup on Saturday. On each cleanup day, a convoy of trucks drove through the neighborhoods and picked everything up.
The “Takeover” aspect of the project encouraged residents to take over responsibility for caring for their environment after the cleanup. Topeka’s Takeover/Makeover removed 175,380 tons of trash over those two days.
Philicia McKee, the executive director of Keep America Beautiful-Topeka/Shawnee County, traced the origin of her city’s cleanup project to Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten, who emphasized city beautification during his campaign platform in 2005.
“He put together a task force and it’s been a wonderful partnership,” McKee said.
In addition to the annual cleanup project, the task force restructured the property code enforcement department.
“The mayor realized that the code officers didn’t have enough authority,” McKee said. “No one paid attention to them, so they placed the office under the auspices of the police department.”
McKee credits Topeka Police Chief Ron Miller and City Manager Norton Bonaparte with the kind of support that turned code enforcement around.
“We were all on the same page with the broken window theory,” she said. “If a building has one broken window, pretty soon it’s going to have two. Then the building next door will have a broken window, and the neighborhood will continue to deteriorate. It’s like a virus.”
Lt. Thomas Glor, who heads up the Code Enforcement Unit at the Topeka Police Department, believes the unit has become more effective since the switch in July 2008 because of tighter structure and organization.
“We’ve put the code enforcement inspectors in uniform and provided them a lot of training they hadn’t gotten otherwise,” he said.
Code Enforcement Unit Supervisor Patty Burkholder has overseen a significant change in inspections and other unit activity.
“Our caseload has increased dramatically because we’re taking a more proactive role,” she said. “We want to resolve an issue before it becomes a complaint that is called in.”
Her unit of seven inspectors is running more than 1,200 cases a month compared to about 300 per month a year ago.
In Topeka, 39 percent of property is rental property, and part of the code enforcement unit’s job is to track down landlords who do not keep the standards of the city code. With the more proactive approach, the unit provides several chances for remedying problems, but if their requests do not bring results, the unit does not hesitate to take the landlords to court.
“We’ll work with anybody,” Burkholder said, “but if you ignore us, you’re going to court. I’ve had several landlords finally get in touch because they’ve been sent to court. Now they’re calling; now they want to take care of it.”
Emporia’s ambitious, four-weekend Clean Sweep project shows that a smaller community can make great strides in improving neighborhoods, too.
Emporia Clean Sweep is doing more than improving the looks and safety of our neighborhoods. It is raising our awareness of the City of Emporia’s property codes, which are designed to maintain a good-looking town we can be proud of and that will attract businesses, students and retirees.
It is proving that our city officials care about the condition of our neighborhoods, which they’ve shown by allocating tens of thousands of dollars in personnel and equipment to help get the job done.
And, maybe most importantly, it is showing us that when we work together, we can move mountains.