Community service makes molehill out of mountain
For decades, masses of garbage rotted in the secluded woods next to Mt. Paran Church property on Rattlesnake Mountain in Linden. Now, thanks to a cooperative effort involving the Rattlesnake Mountain Association (RMA), the Litter Control Program and other county participants, and the Piedmont Environmental Council, only those remnants too small to sift from the soil serve as a reminder of the illegal dump.
The trash was located in two areas near the church, which combined, covered approximately 450 yards of ground and at points towered as high as eight feet. In January, members of RMA, a grassroots community watchdog representing more than 200 residents and property owners along the Fiery Run Corridor in Linden, met with Director of Environmental Services Mike Dorsey at the site to discuss details of the cleanup, including sorting the trash to be recycled, and addressing any toxic waste issues.
On Feb. 4, Court Services Officer and Litter Control Coordinator Doug MacDonald and his crew, a handful of people who had been sentenced by the General District Court to complete unpaid community service labor, went to work.
“When I first saw the site, it looked like it was going to be impossible,” said MacDonald, who was in charge of supervising both the contractors and workers. “But we picked away at it, and got through it.”
MacDonald’s crew, which worked four days a week, and a crew from the jail, which worked two days a week, separated glass bottles and aluminum cans from non-recyclables, among other much larger objects, such as televisions and refrigerators, and even some old cars. When a member of the crew came across objects that might contain hazardous toxins, such as the 20 car batteries they found, a yellow flag was placed in the ground so that Environmental Services could examine the soil.
According to MacDonald, the contractors, who had been hired to pile the trash into a rear-end loader, compact it and drive it away, carried away two truck loads of trash to the dump each day. The crews completed the cleanup on March 15. “I think they all gained something,” Macdonald said about the hours of unpaid labor his crew members put in. “They felt good about what they did.”
The Litter Control Program was created by the county in July 2006 as a result of complaints concerning the Mt. Paran site and litter elsewhere in the county.
Tom Pavelko, director of the Office of Adult Court Services, volunteered his department to coordinate the program on the basis that the department supervises the probation obligations of more than 700 criminal offenders each year, many of whom have been ordered by the court to complete unpaid community service.
Prior to the creation of the program, the expected cost of cleaning up Mt. Paran prevented the county from taking action.
Before the county could move forward with Mt. Paran cleanup, it was legally required to exhaust every measure to contact the land owners. County officials eventually traced the land back to absentee owners, who inherited the property but never lived there or paid property taxes and were unwilling to clean it up. This gave the county authorization to step in. Pavelko said he is still working with the sheriffs office to uncover those responsible for illegally using the site as a dump.
In 2007, more than 80 community service workers completed 1,100 hours of free labor for the program, collecting 2,200 bags of trash, and recycling more than 225 tires from county roadways and watershed.
“The county is moving toward a strong stance on litter,” said Pavelko.
If you see litter that needs to be picked up, call the litter hotline at (540) 349-1871.