Cleanup work has to be redone

GETAWAY — At first, it looked like the old adage was coming true.

Just a few days after 70 volunteers from Pomaria and Mt. Hope Baptist churches and the Getaway Go Getters 4-H group spent a Saturday morning earlier this month picking up 105 bags of litter, someone undid all that work. Bags and bags of household trash were dumped along the five-mile route they had cleaned.

So no good deed goes unpunished?

Not for this group. Someone in the group just went back out and cleaned up the debris again.

“I was very upset,” Dan Palmer, director of the Lawrence Scioto Solid Waste District, said about the second littering. “These people came out on a Saturday to do a good project. It is a little disheartening.”

That is why Palmer and Steve Hileman the district’s investigative officer, went through all the trash to see if they could find a name with the intent to take the individual to court.

“If anyone saw that happen, please contact our office,” Palmer said. “We need license numbers and that has been pretty successful for (prosecuting) dumping in the county. You have good groups doing this cleanup.

“All these groups are coming in and they are doing it on their own on Saturday.”

Palmer said he told the volunteers he would send a crew from the district for a second cleaning, but was told they wanted to take care of it themselves.

The churches’ foray into the cleanup had been on their agendas for some time.

“It was really to show the community that our churches are not in four walls, to do something for the community,” Ben Coleman, pastor of Pomaria church, said. “The 4-H program as well as both churches always wants to give back to our community. This was our community service project.”

Next project for the volunteers is to expand the cleanup area and include all the churches on Greasy Ridge.

“This is just because we can,” Coleman said. “Just because we care about our community.”