The fierce urgency of litter by Piney Woods Pete

Important: All passwords were reset on 06/15/11. Old passwords will no longer work. Click here to retrieve your password.
Login
Logout
Subscribe to Our Free Dewsletter

Like the Dew?

We are non-commercial, all volunteer and supported by our readers. Please help sustain the Dew by making a donation.

The fierce urgency of litter

by Piney Woods Pete | 5, Add your Comment | Jun 3, 2009

The folks who run Tybee Island are getting serious about litter, again.

No, really. They mean it this time.

They wanted to stop litter back when they made Naz T. Butt their official, if cartoonish, anti-litter spokesfigure.

They had the best of intentions when they passed their existing anti-litter regulation. And the one before that. And when they agreed to let Lamar Outdoor Advertising donate three billboards on the island to advertise the get-tough slogan “Some Butts Don’t Belong On The Beach.” Like outdoor billboards aren’t litter taken to its most extreme.

But now the Tybee City Council plans to beautify Georgia’s northernmost beach by enacting a $100 minimum fine for littering on the beach or at city parks or parking lots.

The Tybee Council, or any local government, can pass all the rules it wants about litter. The problem won’t be solved unless local police decide litter is an issue worth fighting. The problem won’t be solved unless local governments make stopping litter a priority.

Police have plenty on their minds maintaining public order. Fighting litter is pretty low on their list of things to do. But if a town, say Tybee, were to hire an officer specifically to fight litter, that officer would need nothing more than a good camera to nail the folks who toss litter. The fines generated by such an officer would far exceed the officer’s salary requirements. In fact, the bet here in the flat woods is that a good litter officer would generate enough extra to pay a litter pickup crew. That would reduce unemployment and free those prison road crews for vital tasks such as grass cutting and sidewalk sweeping.

Will they do it? Most doubtful. Even beautiful Tybee, a burg never shy about raising revenue by slapping fines on tourists, seems to lack the will to attack litter with more than civic-minded slogans.

If they were serious about litter, there would be a cop on that beat.

There is trash in the flat woods, too.

A young man in a pickup truck drove past the P.W. Pete homestead early on Sunday morning and flung out a beer can.

“Hey!” I shouted.

“What?” he called back.

“Don’t throw out that trash on the street.”

“The city will pick it up.” He rammed his truck into low gear.

“No they won’t,” I shouted back.

“Well, then the county will get it.”

“No, they won’t,” I said. “I’ll have to pick it up.”

The young man drove off, then circled the block and came back down my street. He got out of his truck, picked up the beer can and heaved it toward the woods opposite my house.

Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, said it best: “A community which will tolerate trash will tolerate shacks.”

Litter is urgent.

__________________________________

A gotta see YouTube of one of Tybee’s anti-litter TV spots:

View Larger Map

###

Piney Woods Pete

Hard-charging salesman by day, Piney Woods Pete stays up late into the foggy night to render words.

Note: Users are solely responsible for opinions they post here and for the agreed-upon rules of civility. Comments do not reflect the views of LikeTheDew.com. Comments are automatically checked for inappropriate language, but readers might find some comments offensive or inaccurate. If you believe a comment violates our rules, click here to report a violation.

JDG

I’m sure if the police ever assigned a litter officer to the beach, there’d be no required burden of evidence like a photo or video. It’d just be their word against yours, like most traffic infractions, and your word wouldn’t count.

Can’t wait to be fined $100 for parking my beach chair within 20 yards of someone else’s trash.

Litter sucks, but more cops is not the answer in my opinion.
http://www.tybeebeautification.org JG

While the Tybee Beautification Association appreciates publicity that promotes anti-littering, Naz T. Butt is a copy write protected mascot as is the video. Its use should be cleared with the officers before using it. Thank you.
Michael

“The ‘government agency name here’ will take care of the problem” seems to be a common attitude for a lot of things, not just litter. Sometimes that’s the right attitude -- someone must, for example, create the fire department, but continuing that analogy, it’s like saying, “It’s okay if i throw my lit match in the waste basket, because the fire department will take care of it.” While true, the damage caused by holding that attitude is incalculable!

From the other side of things, putting a police officer on the beach to cite litterers may be too simplistic. Drunk and disorderly, heat stroke, dogs on the beach, drugs, a variety of other situations would arise that the officer would have to deal with, as well as the propensity for litterers to think of littering in much the same perverse way smokers used to think of smoking as a right. You’d need a team of officers, with a lot of training. And backup.

Then, there’s the PR hit. Plenty of folks already think Tybee is gouging them for parking, despite the need to pay to renourish the beach, run Ocean Rescue, patrol the area, and pick up trash, among many other City services that are necessitated by visitors and paid for by parking fees. Perhaps we can afford to tick off a few more people with high fines, agressively applied -- one way to take care of the parking situation is to aggravate everyone further so they don’t bother to come down to the beach. We’d have fewer people around to litter, too.

BTW, while Naz *is* copyrighted (by TBA, and not by the City of Tybee Island), linking to the YouTube video is highly encouraged! That’s why it’s posted there!
Tim Oliver

A $100.00 fine for littering on Tybee’s beach? Why, on Orange Crush weekend ( Tybee’s version of Freaknik ), alone, they could make millions !
Pingback: Homepage

The poet's house

U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey isn’t the first nationally acclaimed wordsmith to make her home in Decatur, Ga. Between 1892 and 1916, Charles W. Hubner (1835-1929), the “Poet Laureate of the South,” lived at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Gordon Street in the city’s southwest quadrant. After a couple of decades in Atlanta, Hubner had a home built in the fashionable East End subdivision, one of the Atlanta Suburban Land Company’s residential ventures in unincorporated DeKalb County along the streetcar line linking Decatur and Atlanta. The Baltimore, Md., native served as a Confederate telegraph officer in the Civil War. After the war, H Read on →

Heritage Inaction

For some reason, a letter from the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation was characterized as having been received by NBC News, as if it were some sort of privileged communication. In fact, the thing was a press release and rather obviously designed to change the conversation about the Heritage Foundation from trying to defend the indefensible "study" of Hispanic intellectual insufficiency to food stamps, a real two-fer issue. Two-fer in the sense of being offensive on two fronts since the dollars doled out represent a subsidy to industrial agriculture, even as they serve to remind the indigent that, if they're Read on →

Interpreting at the Free Clinic

I had an interesting morning yesterday at the Free Clinic. Once a week I’m a Spanish interpreter in an organization supported by over 400 volunteers who give a few hours a week of their particular expertise in a smoothly run team. We cater for patients with chronic conditions needing regular medication, having no access to health insurance. Yesterday we met a new patient who is deaf and mute since birth. We took her through her eligibility interview with a social worker, then a nurse took her health history, followed by a doctor's consultation and a laboratory test. In the seven years I Read on →

A Sick and Broken Spirit

As it says in my by-line, in the several items I've posted previously on "Like the Dew," I recently ran for Congress. But I am not a politician, nor possessed of a personal ambition to hold public office. I ran, rather, because for the past nine years I have had a message that I regard as so urgent that I've been willing to do whatever I can to spread it far and wide in order to persuade my fellow citizens of its truth and importance. I believe that for the past decade or so America has faced a crisis as pr Read on →

LikeTheDew.com

Sections

Our Writers