S.J. leaders allocate $3 million to clean up rampant increase in illegal dumping

Officials say the activity has gotten out of hand since pandemic began

After weeks of hounding city leaders with calls and emails, launching grassroots neighborhood campaigns and even petitions, San Jose is pumping up its efforts to clean up the growing blight and illegal dumping mounting in pockets across the city.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and council members Lan Diep, Sergio Jimenez and Dev Davis on Monday announced a plan to allocate an additional $3 million toward cleaning up the most “highly visible” and “high-traffic” illegal dump sites in the city over the next three months. The entire City Council will decide whether to move forward with the plan at its meeting on Sept. 22.

“We look forward to having a cleaner community because we know that then we’ll have a better chance of attracting tourists again and new businesses as we recover from the economic fallout of COVID-19,” Davis said.

Although San Jose is no stranger to illegal dumping, the problem has grown worse since

the COVID-19 pandemic began, with Liccardo calling it a “stratospheric increase” in illegal dumping. City officials suspended its illegal dumping crews for several weeks during the pandemic, along with abatements of homeless encampments, allowing trash and debris to accumulate longer than normal. And as home-ridden residents have spent more time decluttering in recent months, some have felt freer to add their own junk onto the piles.

In turn, pockets of the city — from creek beds and off-ramps to long stretches of roadways — are now littered with piles of trash, tires, abandoned vehicles and furniture. According to the mayor’s memo, illegal dumping of appliances, in particular, has jumped significantly since the start of the pandemic.

The new funding, which would triple the budget within the city’s Emergency Operations Center for blight response for the remainder of the year, will be used to hire more contractors and bring back some furloughed city employees to increase clean-ups at “sore spots that have had the greatest impact on residents’ perception of their community,” the council members’ memo states.

Deputy City Manager Jim Ortbal has been open about the city’s inability to address all of the blight in the city with its limited resources.

Only about 10% of San Jose’s 200 known homeless encampments and illegal dumping sites are inspected and cleaned up once a week, according to city statistics. Yet Ortbal says that all 200 sites need to be visited weekly to truly keep the city clean.

Ortbal said Monday that the additional funding will “enable us to do more, to test more, to try more and to bring back better solutions” to the mayor and council by December — when the city’s Beautify SJ

team is expected to present a more robust plan for routine trash pick-up services to encampments and illegal dumping sites on city properties by the start of 2021.

Jim Salata, owner of Garden City Construction who has tried for years to get local officials to address the trash and debris that accumulates on the off-ramps of Interstate 280 in downtown San Jose, said he was pleased to see city officials step up. But he’s reserving judgment until December, when city officials will unveil their more comprehensive long-term plan.

“I think anything that we start doing is fantastic, but it has to be sustained,” Salata said. “It can’t be a one-shot deal just because the heat is on now.”

Aside from the anticipated new funding, San Jose residents, who have grown more and more vocal in recent weeks about their dismay over the poor state of their city, are starting to see some progress and action from the city.

South San Jose early last week started a Change.org petition, which now has more than 2,500 signatures, to urge city officials to clean up a stretch of Monterey Road along the Union Pacific Railroad tracks from Bailey Avenue to Bernal Road where the dumping has become out of control. After creating the petition and sending hundreds of emails to city officials to denounce their lack of response, the city announced

late last week that Union Pacific and the city would begin clean-up work at the site on Monday.

While glad to see their voices were heard, residents in the area are questioning what took officials so long to clean up the mess.

“The city needs to start leading and not reacting to these problems,” said David Nettemeyer, a south San Jose resident who started the petition. “You can’t just keep reacting to stuff or you’re just continuing to spend money that the city doesn’t really have.”

Since many of the city’s “problem sites” are owned by private entities such as Caltrans, Union Pacific and Santa Clara County Valley Water, the council members also have also asked staff to provide them with an update Sept. 22 on their correspondence with those entities and any plans in the works to clean-up their properties.

For instance, a proposal between the city and Union Pacific that would require the company to clean up its right of way roughly once a month and allow San Jose employees to enter the tracks for law enforcement calls and homeless outreach has been in the hands of Union Pacific attorneys for the past seven months. The city is still waiting for their approval.

“Obviously the pressure made a difference,” Salata said. “But we’re going to keep pressing. The city is only half the problem.”