Ron Nissimov reports the the city of Houston will soon be cracking down on the growing problem of… residents who put trash out early?
Residents who place heavy trash on their curbsides too early can expect some unwanted visits from city officials.
The city plans to deputize 300 civilian employees in the near future to allow them to issue tickets as part of an effort to get tough on violators, officials said Wednesday.
“What’s one person’s heavy trash is another person’s eyesore,” Mayor Bill White said.
White said he would institute a “zero tolerance” policy by issuing citations to violators instead of giving warnings, but the official in charge of enforcement said this would not necessarily mean that all violators would be cited.
Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Brian Lumpkin, who heads the mayor’s newly created neighborhood protection division, said the new policy will likely result in more citations. He added that inspectors and officers will try to resolve problems over early placement of heavy trash before issuing citations.
“We don’t want to throw out common sense with zero tolerance,” Lumpkin said.
That’s reassuring, because bureaucrats armed with citation powers are known for their frequent exercise of common sense.
Meanwhile, that traditional eyesore known as graffiti is apparently a lower priority in Mayor White’s beautification program:
If Houstonians think they’ve been noticing more graffiti in their neighborhood recently, it’s probably not their imagination. But, it’s not that more gang members are “tagging” or spray painting, but that less is being done to get rid of it.
Many people who live in Lindale Park work hard to keep their bungalows beautiful and lawns looking great. Lately, they’ve seen a lot of new paint, but not the kind they want.
Virginia Duke is a neighborhood resident. “We have a nice neighborhood over here and if you turn down this street, here you have graffiti. And if you’re looking for a home, this is not what you wanna see when you’re driving into the neighborhood.”
Ed Reyes agrees. “It’s a long effort. You report it and time goes on and you get frustrated because you don’t think anything is happening.”
Not even fences are keeping taggers away. What’s worse, people in the neighborhood say, they recently learned a city program that had workers painting over the eyesores is gone.
Ed Reyes points to a graffiti covered building and says, “If that program was in effect, something like this building might have been taken care of a long time ago.”
For now Lindale Park and other Houston neighborhoods are on their own.
Patricia Harrington with the Mayor’s anti-gang office promises all is not lost. “The contract expired probably sometime in mid-April and we started on the legal part, having to draft the new contract. And they had been working on that and then it had to go to the county, so they can look at it as well and just work out any details.”
Besides, as Mayor White might say, one person’s graffiti is another person’s urban art.
This city’s priorities still confound from time to time, even under Mayor White’s leadership.
