Battle against trash in Oakland is never-ending

Elmano Gonsalves scanned the parking lot outside the Lake Merritt Sailboat House.

On the ground, there was broken glass, food wrappers and cups that had once held coffee and soda. It looked like people had come there to clean out their cars.

“This is the jewel of Oakland, right?” Gonsalves said of Lake Merritt.

I spent part of a morning this week with Gonsalves, an Oakland native who drove me to blighted spots in the city that he’s photographed.

For about a year, he’s been copying me on emails he sends to city officials, complaining about dumping on public streets and sidewalks, as well as graffiti on public property.

“I don’t see really anybody taking the lead and doing it,” he said as we toured Lake Merritt.

Gonsalves, 57, is a retired sanitation worker. He spent 33 years hauling trash in the East Bay, working for Waste Management of Alameda County and its predecessor, the Oakland Scavenger Company.

He said he takes pictures because he cares.

“I just see a lot of things that just are neglected, and should be done in a more efficient manner,” he said. “I don’t want people to come (to Oakland) and confirm their biases by saying, ‘Look at this. I was right.’ ”

He’s right. It’s a mess out here.

Drive through some neighborhoods, and you’ll see a lot more than just litter here and there. There’s evidence of illegal dumping. In some places, you see more mattresses, couches and punctured garbage bags than people on the streets.

It’s not that Oakland isn’t trying to clean up the trash on the streets — it’s that it’s clearly not keeping up. And, it’s a bad look.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who’s running for re-election, says she’s working on the problem. She issued a statement Tuesday laying out her strategy for dealing with the issue. It began: “Dear Oaklanders, Our city has a massive and awful problem ... It’s illegal dumping, and it’s trashing all of us.”

She said help is on the way: The city will hire “three new litter enforcement officers — trash detectives who will investigate and track down illegal dumpers and hold them accountable for the damage they’re doing to our city.”

She said Oakland already spends $5.5 million

a year to clean up illegal dumping.

Still, like Gonsalves, Oakland City Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan thinks the city could do a better job. Kaplan said the city wastes time and money in the way it deals with illegal dumping.

The city has a complaint-driven strategy for clearing garbage, meaning city crews clean up dumping sites once a complaint is filed. If a crew passes a dump site while they’re out and the complaint hasn’t been logged, it probably won’t get cleared, according to Kaplan and other city officials.

Kaplan wants geographic assignments for cleanup crews, and adding two crews is at the

top of her requests for the city’s midcycle budget review.

“Then you go down a street, and you pick up everything in that street, instead of going through a checklist, and driving from one thing on the checklist to the next, without ever getting an area completely cleaned,” Kaplan said. “More gets done when you do it by zones.”

Schaaf said the city began testing a block-toblock cleanup system in East Oakland in March. And in June, if it proves to be more efficient than the complaint-driven system — and the Public Works Department recommends a change, the city will implement the new method within a year.

She also said the city responds to 90 to 95 percent of the complaints it gets within two business days, an improvement over the 80 to 85 percent within three business days.

The problem, she insists, is that the trash is relentless.

The city has assigned an additional crew to remove trash, and it purchased a new “packer truck,” which was on display this week in front of City Hall, to haul debris.

It stinks that illegal dumping often occurs in the same spots. Lidia Leon, a member of the East Oakland Congress of Neighborhoods who lives in District Five, which includes the Fruitvale, Seminary and Jingletown neighborhoods, said the trash piles always return.

Her 17-year-old son told her she was spending a lot of time worrying about garbage.

“This is how Oakland is,” she recalled him telling her. “You can’t change it.”

“That really affected me a lot,” she told me. “Your kids are seeing this every day — they really get used to it, thinking it’s just normal.”

Now it’s up to the city to make trash pickup normal.