Extra trash pickup in the city? Send them to West Baltimore

Let’s have the Baltimore City Department of Public Works provide an extra day of trash collection to a community with over 300 boarded-up and vacant houses (“Inspector General: Affluent Baltimore community received extra trash collection, costing city $100,000,” Nov. 27), rather than an affluent area that arguably doesn’t need it.

Why doesn’t the Matthew A. Henson Neighborhood, located in the Easterwood area of West Baltimore — also known as the hardest hit 2015 Freddie Gray riot area — have these extra city collection? It was no accident that volunteers from other states came to this area to respond to President Donald Trump’s claim that it’s a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Since 2009, our community has suffered with a plethora of trash dumping.

Mind you, our community is actively involved with the twice-a-year Mayor’s Clean-up and a four-times-a-year roll-off trash collection.

We also are a leading community with the BMORE Beautiful Youth Project, where we have 10 young people each week paid $10 an hour for five hours a week to help with cleaning-up and beautifying our community.

Yet, we are suffering with over a dozen residential and commercial dumping areas cropping up each week. Often times, next to properly used garbage receptacles, there are bags of trash and garbage, because there isn’t a sufficient number of trash collection days.

Yes, we have many large rats throughout our community. We are doing everything we can to help us help ourselves. We have consistently requested that the insufficiently used recycling day be switched to twice-a-week trash collection. It is a significant waste of resources and manpower to have crews provide recycling for a community where less than 10% of residents even have recycle bins, not to mention even use them.

This is a major example of mismanagement of resources.

Marvin L. Cheatham, Sr., Baltimore

The writer is president of the Matthew A. Henson Neighborhood Association.