HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Not much can surprise Alffe Blake anymore, not after two years as Hartford’s lone sanitation inspector.
He makes a living working backward, tracing the steps of people who seemingly care so little about the city, they cover it - illegally - with things they no longer value.
Trash in all forms: stained and tattered furniture, broken electronics, construction debris dropped by unscrupulous contractors. In July, Blake found a 25-foot fishing boat sitting on Ledyard Street. Two months earlier, he ran aground of a bright-yellow Jet Ski left out on the curb of Putnam Heights like so many bags of kitchen scraps.
And milk crates. There are always milk crates, the tool of choice for car thieves looking to prop up cars they’ve boosted the tires and other parts from, he said.
Big or small, the city is obligated to grab this trash. And the cost is piling up: Officials estimate that the city spends about $1 million yearly to take care of illegal dumping and litter. That’s on top of the routine cost for trash collection.
The department of public works, almost a year after its new director took over, is taking a stand. Its leadership is rolling out a multipronged strategy to address what they call “the trashing of Hartford.” It’s a complete overhaul, boosted by the appointment of the city’s first blight director, a staffer who’ll take a closer look at blighted properties, magnets for this kind of illegal dumping.
“We’d have to have angels flying around with wings to catch some of these things,” Blake said recently as he did his rounds.
Since taking office in January, Mayor Luke Bronin has pushed the department of public works, under Marilynn Cruz-Aponte, his appointee, to take a more organized approach to litter and dumping. Now, city workers are compiling lists of problem areas, places where trash is dumped daily, sometimes multiple times a day.
They’re sharing that information with police, hoping to catch some of the more brazen offenders in the act.
“The problem here is that when you look at this, ask yourself who might be doing it,” Cruz-Aponte said. “It’s not the lady who lives down the street in a two-family house. These are probably small-business people who should know the laws, but the margins are reduced when you have to pay for disposal.”
Finding them is one thing. Punishing them is another.
If city officials know who is behind the dumping, they send them a bill to recoup their pickup and disposal costs. In cases in which it’s clear that the waste is coming from a single property, the city bills the property owner.
But, as Cruz-Aponte and her colleagues said, the lion’s share of the costs are simply eaten by the city. And that’s just one of the motivations behind Bronin’s push to clean up the capital.
“A key part of revitalizing and straightening our neighborhoods is removing the cancer of blight that can spread,” he added. “You want to try and eliminate blight before it becomes contagious, before it starts to drag down property values around it, before it eliminates people’s desire to invest in their own properties.”
To that end, Bronin used federal funding to hire Laura Settlemyer, the city’s first blight director, whose first day was Tuesday. The job is no stretch for Settlemyer, a veteran of similar positions in New Orleans, Detroit and Flint, Michigan.
The mayor said he was motivated to tackle blight by the “fragmented and fairly weak efforts” that were in place before he took office. He pointed specifically to former Mayor Pedro Segarra’s Livable and Sustainable Neighborhood Initiative, a program heavily criticized in a 2012 audit as lacking the oversight and expertise needed to make it successful.
“This will be a much more coordinated effort that has hands-on, day-to-day management by someone who’s got extensive experience in combating blight and whose sole job is to focus on it,” Bronin said.
Settlemyer will push to use the full punitive measures available to the city, like liens levied against blighted properties. But another part of her focus will be working parallel to public works’ efforts to curb litter in all forms, illegal dumping included.
“We believe that when a city has the kind of littering that happens and the kind of condition we’re looking at, patterns develop,” Cruz-Aponte said. “When something is dirty, people come and dump some more. We need to find a way to get away from that and manage to be very clean, and that’ll stop this kind of behavior.”
This is more than the assumption of a municipal department head. Cruz-Aponte has concrete examples that Hartford is seen as a “dumping ground.”
Last summer, public works employees spotted a pickup truck loaded with six mattresses pull off I-91 and cruise around the North End. Following a hunch, they kept their eyes out for that truck during their rounds.
Sure enough, they found it a short time later, its driver unloading the mattresses on the curb outside his friend’s house. He was given permission, he told the workers. He knew, he said, that Hartford picked up bulk items year-round, unlike Springfield, Massachusetts, where he had traveled from to dump them.
Cruz-Aponte is working to tighten the city’s current, generous bulk-item policy, which allows people to put out between three and five big items every week. Nearby cities, including New Britain, New Haven and, yes, Springfield, limit those pickups to a few times a year. And they’re by appointment only.
It’s difficult, obviously, to educate dumpers that aren’t seen. But workers, like Blake, are becoming amateur detectives, piecing together evidence tracing the trash back to its source.
And then there are cases when the act is interrupted in progress. Like the story of Cleon Bruins.
In the predawn hours of Sept. 21, a security guard contracted by the city’s Housing Authority to watch over the Westbrook Village and Bowles Park housing projects found Bruins unloading a box truck “full of tires” in a secluded parking lot frequented by illegal dumpers, according to a police report filed in the case.
The officer who responded to the guard’s calls spoke to Bruins, who identified himself as an employee of M&M Auto and Tire, spitting distance from the Hartford line in Bloomfield. Bruins apologized for dumping the tires, explaining he “did it in frustration” after being told to dispose of them and had trouble doing so in the legal method, the report says.
In an interview with the Courant earlier this month, Bruins admitted he made a mistake. He stressed that the idea to dump the tires was his, and his alone.
“I feel bad, because I didn’t know how much this is going on,” said Bruins, who has been charged with illegal dumping and criminal trespassing. “My conscience is bad. I know the city is spending money on this, while they also have to close schools.”
Cruz-Aponte had a response to that, too.
“We talk all the time about how citizens can help in a budget crisis,” she said. “There’s a really simple way: Don’t litter.”
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Information from: Hartford Courant, https://www.courant.com
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