City Reps: No rest till city nabs mattress dumpers
STAMFORD — On Maher Road, near where it crosses East Main Street, a stack of mattresses, some bureau drawers and other items are piled beside four clothing dropoff bins.
Residents are calling their representatives about the site, where junk is repeatedly ditched.
Representatives are calling for the city to catch the culprits.
Everybody has had it with illegal dumping.
At their December meeting, members of the Board of Representatives’ Operations Committee asked Mark McGrath, director of the Office of Operations, what can be done to break the cycle.
It goes like this: Unscrupulous people dump their junk on the streets. City crews pick it up. The unscrupulous people dump more junk. The city picks it up again.
“We cannot continue to call you to pick up,” Rep. Anabel Figueroa, D8, told McGrath. “The city cannot continue to absorb the
cost. We need to work together to figure out what can be done.”
Clothing dropoff bins appear to attract illegal dumpers, Rep. Nina Sherwood, D8, said during the meeting. The bins on Maher Road — one for the American Red Cross Connecticut Chapter and three for a White Plains, N.Y., company called OGS Recycling — present a particular problem, Sherwood said.
They are lined up at the edge of the sidewalk beside an empty lot.
“People see it as a place where they can dump things,” Sherwood said.
Friday morning junk was piled not only beside the clothing bins but also along a driveway leading to the empty lot. Four mattresses, two dresser drawers, a cabinet door and a large box that had once contained baby wipes were among the items in the pile.
Representatives wanted to know whether the property owner or the bin owners can be made to clean up.
Chief Citation Officer Frank Fedeli said Friday he checked Maher Road and found that the bins are on private property. In such cases he usually sends a
warning letter to the property owner and, if the site is not cleaned up, issues a citation that comes with a fine of $1,000 per incident.
But the owner of the property, which faces East Main Street, said he’s in the same spot as the city.
“We’ve cleaned it up quite a few times,” John Peters said. “It’s always mattresses. When it rains, they get so heavy you can’t lift them.”
Until recently, there was little dumping by the clothing bins, though it’s always occurred further down Maher Road, beside the Interstate 95 overpass, and on Ursula Place, which intersects Maher, Peters said.
“Once we cleaned up a bunch of chairs. Then we found more of the same kind of chairs. So it must have been the same person doing it,” Peters said. “Once I caught a lady in the middle of the day dumping tires. I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ She said, ‘Oh, I can’t?’ I said, ‘No.’ She put them back in her car and drove away.”
Alex Husted, coowner of Helpsy, parent company of OGS Recycling, said he also cleans up for unscrupulous dumpers.
“It’s a terrific problem. Mattresses, furniture, old exercise equipment, TVs — people are looking for a place to dump stuff
and, for whatever reason, we become a target,” Husted said. “Our policy is that when we pick up clothing, we clean up around the bins. It costs us a fortune every year in trash disposal fees. We have this trouble in a number of towns.”
Stefanie Arcangelo, chief communications officer for the American Red Cross, said illegal dumping has been a problem at some bin sites. The organization’s bin vendor will clean up Maher Road as soon as possible, Arcangelo said.
“The site will also be placed on a watch list for ongoing issues and, if warranted, will be changed or deleted from the program,” she said.
McGrath told representatives during the committee meeting that the dumping, whether it’s tenants or landlords, appears to be related to the large stock of rental units in Stamford.
“People are rotating in and out of their apartments and they’re just throwing stuff on the sidewalk,” McGrath said. “It’s a chickenandegg situation. If they put stuff out there and we pick it up, they do it the next week and the week after that.”
Fedeli said the dumping largely follows a pattern.
“It’s not exclusive, but an awful lot of illegal dumpers are from overcrowded rental units.
The tenants are transient,” he said. “Like clockwork, a lot of the stuff goes out around the first and fifteenth of each month, when people move.”
Many instances involve repeat offenders, said Arthur Augustyn, spokesman for Mayor David Martin. In neighborhoods where illegal dumping is frequent, the city is distributing flyers explaining how to file reports with the online citizens’ complaint center, Fix It Stamford, and how to take items to the Katrina Mygatt Recycling Center on Magee Avenue, where residents may dump up to 200 pounds for free per day.
“These flyers will be in English and Spanish. We’re also handdelivering these flyers to residences that have frequent reports of illegal dumping, with the understanding other residents may be dumping on their property,” Augustyn said.
When McGrath mentioned the flyers in the committee meeting, Rep. David Watkins, R1, said the message is wrong.
“The flyers should not say, ‘Please don’t throw out trash.’ They should say, ‘Please take photos of people throwing trash and send it to us,’” Watkins said. “I think the only way to solve this is with enforcement.”
Peters, who lives in Stamford, said maybe officials should reconsider who is allowed to use the city dump.
“It could be that a lot of people who are doing this illegally are not residents, and they might take stuff to the dump if they were allowed,” Peters said.
Husted said OGS Recycling will cooperate with whatever solution officials devise.
“We can report what junk we get when, which we’ve done in other places,” Husted said. “We are happy to be part of the solution. It’s a big problem for us that we would love to solve.”