Our Views: War on litter not victorious
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While driving to Mayor-President Kip Holden’s Press Club of Baton Rouge appearance this week, we spotted lots of litter along Anselmo Lane and in the median of Bluebonnet Boulevard.
We drove down the interstate and made our way to the meeting place downtown, where our parking spot near the intersection of Laurel Street and River Road offered a view of even more litter — a disgusting assortment of beer bottles, empty water containers, old cardboard, plastic foam plates and discarded foam rubber.
While we regret the presence of litter anywhere, we would note that the areas along our driving route are high-profile commercial districts of our city.
If this is the public face we present to the world, what impression will the world have of us?
All of this comes to mind because of Holden’s recently completed “listening tour” of the parish, in which the mayor-president held numerous meetings and asked residents to share their concerns. Traffic congestion and litter were among the more common topics of complaint.
Holden said he wants increased enforcement of litter laws and a greater effort to educate the public about the damage inflicted by littering.
We’ve heard a lot of this before. Holden declared “an all-out war” on littering in March 2007. The results haven’t seemed very dramatic, as evidenced by the fact that littering registered so strongly as a concern during the mayor’s listening tour two years later.
Once a year, volunteers with Keep Baton Rouge Beautiful visit each of the parish’s 12 council districts and document the amount of litter they find. The parishwide score for the 2008 survey is just slightly better than in 2007, but given the limited amount of data collected, we don’t find the results conclusive.
Holden told the Press Club he doesn’t have to walk far to see litter each day. He said smokers routinely drop cigarette butts outside the Governmental Building that houses the mayor-president’s office. The littering occurs even though receptacles are nearby.
If there is a war on litter in Baton Rouge, we’re not winning it — at least not decisively. But if the results of the mayor-president’s listening tour are any indication, a number of East Baton Rouge Parish residents recognize the problem, which is always the first step in solving it.
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