Thursday, May 1, 2003
City Council Chambers
The Don’t Trash Wichita began in June 2001. The initiative began as a way to make our community cleaner, more beautiful and a way to save citizens a lot of money through preventative measures.
Every year, the City spends more than $1.6 million picking up litter, cleaning up illegally dumped trash and repairing vandalized public property.
City maintenance crews spend more than 6,000 hours a year manually picking up litter on public property.
Nearly 2,000 illegally dumped tires are picked up from public property every year.
Environmental Health crews respond to 250 incidents of illegal dumping each year.
Public Works crews spent more than 12,650 hours sweeping major streets in Wichita to pick up litter, trash and debris. The cost to taxpayers was $320,000.
Vandalism to parks and recreation facilities cost taxpayers more than $130,000 a year.
In this time, with budgets as they are, now MORE THAN EVER we need citizens help! By assisting us with this project, citizens can save money by not trashing our community!
The Don’t Trash Wichita campaign contains a 3-prong approach: law enforcement, prevention and community involvement.
FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT: The City Council has stood diligently behind this effort by strengthening penalties for littering, illegal dumping, and vandalism offenses.
The City has made it easier for citizens to participate through the Neighborhood Action Line, 529-9999, which is available 24 hours a day.
Today, we introduce a new phase to further our efforts. At the encouragement of neighborhood organizations, we will help remove those inoperable vehicles that are not only on public property, but also PRIVATE property.
Inoperable vehicles are defines as those vehicles that are wrecked, partially dismantled, not properly registered or up on blocks and most simply – do not run. They are classified as an attractive nuisance and blight and they promote vandalism within our communities.
We have had ordinances in place that dealt the car removal and now we establishing a new process to enforce them.
Citizens who are in violations of this ordinance will be notified and given 10 days to respond or rectify the situation.
At this time, we have more than 300 cars that have been processed and the owners have been notified.
The removal of these vehicles begins today.
Junk car towing will be a joint code enforcement effort and we would like the community to join us in these efforts. It is a citywide problem and we all should participate in the solution.
To give us information on prevention, I would like to introduce Jack Brown, director of Environmental Health.
For the community involvement aspect, I am pleased to introduce Teretha Brown-Foster, a member of my District Advisory Board.
Thank you all for coming... and remember, if you want to live in a nicer city, if you want to help the environment, if you want to save tax dollars, it is really very simple... and it is in your hands... Don’t Trash Wichita!