Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 30, 1995 TAG: 9505300024
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Instead of international terrorists with nuclear devices, it seems we've got to worry about small groups of malcontents with fertilizer bombs. Rather than collisions with comets or asteroids, it's the fluorocarbons in devices like aerosol deodorants that could threaten life on our planet by gobbling up our protective ozone layer.
All of which brings me to the subject of spring cleaning in the New River Valley.
Now, that sounds about as mundane as you can get. But cleanups have taken on a new importance in the region, from little bins on supermarket parking lots where you can separate your recyclables to a huge mobile tire shredder driven around to different localities by the Radford-based Appalachian Regional Recycling Consortium.
Most recently, the counties of Montgomery, Giles and Floyd and the city of Radford got together in April for joint cleanup activities. The town of Pulaski recruited citizens to help out during three successive Saturdays in May. The town copied its approach from the Virginia Department of Transportation's "Adopt a Highway" program, issuing bags and equipment for cleaning up litter from the sections of town each group of citizens "adopted."
"Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness," churchman John Wesley remarked some 200 years ago. In modern times, localities have found that it is pretty close to business and industrial development as well.
The Pulaski Business Alliance, formed in recent years by downtown merchants and now trying to expand throughout the community, made the discovery early that litter on streets discourages people from shopping in a community. It has pushed as hard for litter pickup and cleanup as for more parking space.
The town's Board of Economic Development has held a number of brainstorming sessions to pinpoint the areas it needs to address to promote the business, commercial and cultural development of Pulaski. Cleanliness has come up a surprising number of times in those sessions, which was one of the factors leading to the three Saturdays of spring cleaning in Pulaski this month.
The Pulaski Police Department has found several hundred junked cars, an incredible number when you think about it, and arranged for their disposal in a recent effort aimed at removing their unsightliness.
It is not possible for a local government to police litter by itself, observed Pulaski lawyer T. Rod Layman, one of the Saturday cleanup volunteers. You can increase fines and other penalties, of course. But there are simply not enough law enforcement officers to catch everybody who throws something from a car or dumps debris down the side of a rural embankment, he said. It takes a desire by the public to make littering socially, as well as legally, unacceptable.
Public anger against litterers has been evident lately among citizens working to reopen the Pulaski Wayside atop Draper's Mountain on U.S. 11 leading into Pulaski. The wayside had been there for years. It offered a beautiful scenic view of the area below the mountain. Why did it close? Because it proved impossible to keep some people from ruining it with garbage and debris.
If the Pulaski Wayside is really to reopen, something will have to change about the tacit acceptance of casual dumping around it.
Members of Pulaski Town Council's Public Works Committee made a visit this month to the town's Gatewood Park and were pleased to find only a few cigarette butts, one bottle and one plastic bag marring the landscape. However, on U.S. Forest Service roads in the same area, they found everything from tires to hardware thrown down the banks.
The courts may have found one remedy for public apathy on littering. As recently as last week, several people convicted of littering in Pulaski had to pick up litter in a designated area as part of their sentences.
Attitudes don't change overnight, but, given time, they do change.
by CNB