Let’s talk trash.
It is July Fourth weekend at the beach.
Despite the drama surronding Arthur, multitudes of day-trippers will come to town. Houses, cottages and condos have become weekend and weeklong accommodations for inland friends, extended families and rentals, which translates to copious amounts of trash, even if it rains.
It is a pretty big effort to keep the town, and beach strand, parks and roadways free of litter and garbage (not to mention waterways). The town has come a long way from the days when every trash can on the beach, in the park and throughout the town was overflowing on Monday mornings. More than 26 percent of Wrightsville’s $12.4 million in annual expenses is for public works.
It is common in resort areas and towns for people to disregard garbage and restroom facilities until something goes awry. As a Monday morning photo shows, crowded weekends in the days leading up to this national holiday have seen the downtown Wrightsville area maxed out in terms of garbage and trash left behind.
It is hot. The lines at the ice cream stand day and night are deep. The wooden bench in front of the ice cream stand before the trash can was also piled with used ice cream serving cups and spoons.
On Tuesday, after asking the town to put out additional trash bins in this area, we were told the ice cream stand merchant has been unwilling to supply any trash receptacle for his customers’ use, leaving it up to the taxpayers to haul away his business’ trash.
This particular town receptacle receives a great deal of use, often overflowing with paper plates, pizza boxes, cups and other late-night reveler-generated garbage during the months when the ice cream stand is closed. To add volumes of trash from the thriving ice cream stand is ridiculous.
The town is fortunate customers were willing to shove empty containers into the can until it reached maximum capacity, and then stacked cups and spoons on top of and around the can. They could have tossed them every which way.
The town needs to get tough on this and quickly. Income-producing businesses should not be allowed to continue to offer food for sale without supplying trash cans for patrons even if they have been at that location for decades. To continue to shift the burden onto the already overburdened town public works department supported by taxpayer dollars is simply unacceptable.
There should be a fine levied until the situation is corrected or if the town is unwilling to take that strong approach, public works should drop off one or two green garbage carts per offending business and bill them accordingly.
On the other side of the street, the lovely seating area between the coffee and pizza shops should have trash cans as well. These should be emptied by the business employees whose customers make use of this space.
The downtown area has a charming small beach town appeal that rapidly vanishes the morning after. The town has been working with merchants in the central business district, some of which hold conditional use permits to operate. Not long ago, the town hired a contractor to pressure wash the sidewalks in front of these business on both sides of the street in this two- to three-block area.
It didn’t last but a day or two; the morning-after stench of beer and human waste was back. The cigarette butts were back, too.
Most days it smells like what you’d expect in a third world country. Adding a simple requirement for merchants to clean the sidewalks in front of their establishment would go a very long way in improving the sights and smells in this small but vital section of the beach.
The businesses there with parking lots are already required to have trash cans out, but few, if any, do. Again, the town needs to get tough and require businesses to deal with their trash.
A knee-high picket fence enclosing the Roberts parking lot once served double duty. Besides making the lot more attractive, it served a practical purpose: the low fence caught blowing trash. The fence is gone, but the posts remain. Once-captured trash is freed to blow all over.
Roberts was denied a request for a six-foot-high fence to encircle its parking lot during this week’s planning board meeting. A fence is required under its conditional use permit.
A six-foot-high fence in this congested area would be a huge mistake. Thankfully the planning board members know that. Besides the fact, a six-foot-high fence would totally change the character of this two-block neighborhood, this is an area h-i-g-h-l-y prone to flooding.
The town’s aldermen need to say no to this fence as well.
Now it is time to batten down the hatches for a national holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July!
