This is one of those situations where a picture – several of them, actually – is worth a thousand words.
But, I promise you, I won’t use that many. I don’t need to.
Not if you look at the photographs taken Sunday and sent to me Memorial Day morning by a Central Beach resident who had seen enough.
“I know it’s a busy weekend, but I get up early in the morning and ride my bike all over, and I see this regularly at the city beaches,” he said, asking that I not use his name. “It just looks bad.”
It looks, well, trashy – which is exactly what it is.
The photographs showed beachside trash bins overflowing with garbage at Sexton Plaza and Humiston Park, both of which saw heavy traffic over the holiday weekend.
“I’m sure the same thing is happening at the other beaches, especially this weekend,” the resident said. “What bothered me is that this is what people see as they’re leaving the beach, and it’s bad optics.
“If you’re a visitor from out of town,” he added, “you’re not going to leave with the best impression.”
Maybe I don’t get to the beach enough, but, to be frank, I was shocked and appalled by these photographs, which depict a scene you’d expect to see in Fort Lauderdale or Miami.
This is NOT what you expect to see in Vero Beach, where people take great pride in their small-town community, respect the area’s natural beauty, and go to great lengths to distinguish our patch of paradise from the South Florida sprawl.
But pictures don’t lie.
And for the record: Vero Beach City Manager Jim O’Connor, who broke away from his holiday to take my call, didn’t offer up any excuses – just an explanation and a willingness to address the problem.
He said the city has contractors who empty the beachside trash bins twice each day, once in the early morning and again in the mid-afternoon. City workers clean the bathrooms and empty the trash containers there.
“We’ve gotten complaints like this before, and we’ve addressed them by adding another trash bin,” O’Connor said. “The problem is, it takes only one party to fill them up.
“If you go by Jaycee Park at 4 or 5 in the evening, particularly on a weekend, you’ll probably see a couple of the bins overflowing.”
In many cases, once the wooden bins are full, beachgoers simply dump their trash on the sand alongside them.
“And we don’t mind that,” O’Connor said, explaining that the bins are usually located near the steps leading from the beach.
“We’d rather they dump it there, as opposed to leaving it out on the beach where the breeze can blow it toward the water and the tide can carry it out to the ocean.”
Still, the sight of overflowing trash bins with garbage spilling onto the sand is an eyesore – something that should embarrass all of us.
What’s the solution?
More trash bins? Larger containers? Adding an evening pickup?
“We’ve added bins in the past, and we might need to add more, but we don’t want to go to a dumpster-type thing,” O’Connor said. “We want the smaller bins that can easily be picked up to empty.
“Also, nearly 60 percent of the people who use our beaches don’t live in the city,” he added. “If we went to dumpster-type containers, you might encourage people to come over and use them to dump their household trash.”
Besides, from purely an aesthetic standpoint, does anyone want to see –or smell – a dumpster full of trash as we leave our beaches?
Adding an evening pickup sounds good, until you realize it would make the early-morning pickup unnecessary. It also would cost more.
So unless folks want to start bringing Hefty bags to the beach and taking their trash home with them, O’Connor seems to be doing the best he can, adding more bins as they are needed.
“I have no axe to grind, no agenda,” said the Central Beach resident who sent the photographs. “I live here, and it bothers me when I see this. “
These pictures should bother all of us.
Something needs to be done.
