Sheriff, judge warn against littering

Garland County Sheriff Larry Sanders and County Judge Rick Davis are warning motorists to stop tossing trash onto county roads.

It’s disgusting – and against the law, they say.

“There’s just way too much litter in Garland County,” Sanders said. “If we catch somebody littering or we have evidence of somebody littering, then we’re going to arrest them.”

“People need to stop throwing stuff out of their vehicles, it’s getting to be a natural occurrence. Save it until you get home. Put it in your Wal- Mart bag,” Davis said.

He said county crews can pick up trash from a roadway today “and tomorrow the road will be half packed full

of stuff people threw out the window.”

Davis said trash strewn along county roadways is “disgusting.”

“They just need to look at how bad it looks when they drive by.”

He said the trash problem is intensified when mowers along county roadways unintentionally mow over trash and shred it.

“They disintegrate that stuff and it looks terrible,” he said.

Sanders said the county uses jail inmates to clear road rights of way of trash and debris.

“We encourage people, if they know of a roadway that we don’t know is completely covered in trash, to call us and we’ll get it on the list and get somebody out there to clean it up,” he said.

Sanders said using jail inmates to pick up trash “is a good thing for the community.”

“We utilize them in cleaning up cemeteries and ballparks, the fairgrounds and things that the public uses.”

Sanders said jail inmates are not used to clean up private properties. He said jail inmates are also used to clean rights of way on state highways, and the state reimburses the county “so much per inmate per hour.”

“It doesn’t completely pay for the program, but it certainly brings money back into the county general fund by using inmates to pick up trash along state highways,” Sanders said.

Sanders also said it can be difficult to enforce the county’s littering laws.

“We have to have probable cause and we have to have a case in order to arrest somebody. If we have witnesses or some way to enforce the litter laws naturally we’re going to do it.”

He said that most of the time there are no witnesses or anyone who can say they saw a person dump something out, or provide a license number.

“Litter is one of those things that’s hard to deal with, but we certainly don’t like it and want people to report if they see something where we can follow up on it.”

Sanders said it can be difficult prosecuting an individual for littering even when the person’s name is found on an envelope among trash on a roadway.

“It’s still a situation where you can’t prove without a shadow of a doubt that the individual whose name is on the envelope is the one that threw the trash there,” he said.

“If somebody sees somebody throw something out of a pickup truck and gets the license plate number, how do you know that he was driving the pickup truck?”