Sheriff, police chief discuss litter
Both Gordon County Sheriff Mitch Ralston and Calhoun City Police Chief Tony Pyle spoke at last Thursday evening’s Keep Calhoun Gordon Beautiful meeting, hosted at the Gordon County Library. Gordon County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Robert Paris was also present for the question and answer session.
Founding KCGB member Judy Peterson said the session was intended to help the organization gain perspective on what has worked to combat littering in the past and also to establish collaboration between law enforcement and trash pick-up efforts.
“We want to do everything we can to support your efforts and try to help educate. I don’t know that we want our job to constantly be picking up trash all the time,” Peterson said at the start of the meeting. “I was hoping we could hear it from your perspectives, the city and county perspectives, in terms of what you’ve seen in the past,
what you see works, and what you see doesn’t work. We’d like any recommendations you have so that we’re not just repeating the same tasks over and over.”
Pyle spoke first and compared the battle against littering with the war on drugs. He said he believes littering cannot be “ticketed away,” in the same way that drugs have not been “arrested away.”
“Forty years ago, President Nixon declared a war on drugs. We’ve worked that for the past 40 years and, in my humble opinion, I don’t know if it’s gotten one bit better. I bring that up because we write citations for littering,” Pyle said. “That’s not going to stop people, just like the war on drugs didn’t stop people. We can’t arrest our way out of this. It’s never going to happen.”
Instead, Pyle said he thought education would be the key to making a difference. Reaching people while they are still young enough to be taught how to do the right thing, he said, is important. He offered to make litter one of the topics he speaks to students about on one of his next visits to local pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes.
“I can’t go into the schools and tell a bunch of 5-year-old kids not to get crack cocaine. They don’t even know what that is, and I certainly don’t want to be the one to introduce them to drugs,” Pyle said. “But something like littering? That would be awesome for me and my officers to go talk to the kids about.”
Ralston agreed that education was an important component to ending the litter crisis, which, according to data he shared at the meeting, led to 39.37 tons of trash being picked up off the sides of roads in Gordon County and Calhoun between December 2017 and November 2018. Almost 30 tons of trash have been picked up in the year since, from December 2018 to now.
The sheriff also emphasized the need to partner with local businesses and organizations on the issue. When asked about whether or not strategically placed recycling bins would be worth the money, he suggested local trash companies as potential partners.
“Trash companies are the ones that are the biggest litterers. When they pick up around dumpsters and the wind is blowing, trash gets blown out,” Ralston said. “This group may want to go out and talk to some of the trash companies and they might be able to help you with that effort as far as recycling bins goes. I can’t speak for them, but that might be something they’re interested in. They can’t control the wind and they’re not doing it on purpose, but they are littering. So this could be a good faith partnership they put in with you all because of that.”
Also discussed were landfill tipping fees, which Ralston said he “definitely” thinks have contributed to increases in improper disposal of things like mattresses, couches and tires, and the potential for community clean-ups every three months.
“The biggest thing we have to concern ourselves with is making people understand why this matters and why they should care,” Ralston said. “That’s why that education piece is so important.”