Greenwood and Leflore County are preparing to enter into a partnership with Keep Mississippi Beautiful, a state affiliate of Keep America Beautiful Inc., to address the problem of littering.
Greenwood Mayor Carolyn McAdams said she has been working with the Greenwood-Leflore County Chamber of Commerce and the Leflore County Board of Supervisors to put together a plan to work with the organization.
A meeting is scheduled at the chamber building from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Jan. 25 to put together a committee that will work with Keep Mississippi Beautiful.
Littering has become a source of frustration for Ward 1’s Johnny Jennings, who said he has been “bombarded” with calls and messages about it.
He said he received messages from constituents he never hears from otherwise expressing disappointment about the levels of littering, far more than usual. “They just couldn’t believe the garbage that was stacked on the streets,” he said.
Jennings expressed his frustration at Tuesday’s meeting of the Greenwood City Council after Public Works Director Susan Bailey had given her report. He said he did not want his comments to be seen as frustration with Bailey and was only sharing general opinions.
“I just figured I would make it a little bit more public for them, just to reflect what people were calling me about,” he said. “I was as upset as they were. This is my town I love, and it just hurts me that people don’t have any respect for the cosmetics of the community. It’s an easy problem to solve, but the hard part is coming up with a system that will work.”
Sometimes, he said, a rental property is not cleaned out when a tenant moves out, resulting in remaining furniture and trash simply being stacked on the side of the street. He suggested distributing large trash bins for these properties to use so that the trash is collected in one location.
“I think those things like that tend to make people take a little bit more pride in their community,” Jennings said, “and maybe when they see the nicer streets, they won’t throw trash in the yards, and they won’t throw trash in the streets.”
McAdams said the problem of littering has grown during her tenure as mayor. She specifically mentioned finding trash on bridges that had been thrown from vehicles as well as trash being left in city parks.
“That’s completely just neglect, no pride, no caring what their community looks like, in my total opinion,” she said. “If you’ve got trash cans out there, use them. If we didn’t have trash cans out there, that’s on us, but we’ve got trash cans everywhere, and people still want to just throw it into the street.”
She said excessive littering requires more time and effort from city employees to clean it up.
“I can control downtown very easily. I can’t control the whole city like that,” she said. “There are some streets that you go down and you just think, ‘Oh my gosh, what in the world happened?’”
She said she hopes the partnership with Keep Mississippi Beautiful is fruitful.
“We thought that partnering with them could get us back into some shape of community pride,” she said. “If we had diverse commitment to be on that committee, it would even be greater.”
- Contact Kevin Edwards at 662-581-7233 or kedwards@gwcommonwealth.com.
