San Jose: Reports of illegal dumping soar as city struggles to keep up

Since the launch of an app in 2017 that lets San Jose residents report trash dumped illegally, demand for services has skyrocketed. And while workers and volunteers have collected more garbage than in previous years, the city hasn’t been able to keep up with demand, frustrating residents and raising environmental and health risks.

“It’s clear to me we’re not doing enough,” said Councilman Sergio Jimenez at the City Council meeting on Tuesday. “We hear about it consistently.”

According to a report on the city’s overall Beautify SJ program — an effort to clear San Jose’s streets and waterways of litter, graffiti and other blight — presented at the meeting, Jimenez is not wrong. Residents routinely rank San Jose’s cleanliness as poor.

There are signs of progress. The city’s anti-litter program saw a 200 percent increase in volunteers, and the number of illegal dumping sites cleared more than doubled from around 7,000 in the 2016-17 school year to almost 15,000 in 2017-18. That year, the team cleaned up more than 4,000 mattresses, more than 1,300 gallons of paint and more than 950 gallons of human waste. The Office of Cultural Affairs has agreed to paint 22 murals, and dozens of community organizations have received nearly $300,000 in grant funding to work on beautification projects. The city runs an unlimited junk pickup program for residents, and in 2018, the mayor’s office launched a transitional jobs pilot program that pays homeless residents to clean up litter.

“You’ve hit the sweet spot,” a resident of the Roosevelt Park neighborhood, Jeff Levine, told the council. “This has had a dramatic impact on the quality of life in our neighborhood.”

Yet, Mayor Sam Liccardo acknowledged, “we’re also a victim of our own success.”

In the year before the My San Jose app was released in 2017, the city averaged 543 requests per month to clear illegal dumping sites. After it launched, the average jumped to 1,583 a month. And while the response team’s response time declined from more than six days in the 2016-17 fiscal year to around three days in March 2018, the amount of overtime the city paid increased, leading to a program deficit of more than $200,000.

And where the response team used to locate illegal dumping sites, workers are now solely focused on responding to residents who request pickups in the app, meaning neighborhoods where people are less likely to report blight have seen less service.

“Blight begets more blight,” said Councilwoman Maya Esparza. “If people think it’s okay, they just go out and add to the piles.”

And, Esparza added, many of the community groups in her district — one of the most economically disadvantaged in the city — aren’t formal neighborhood associations, meaning groups that could benefit from grant funding aren’t getting it.

Complicating the issue is the fact that the app is only in English right now. In a memo, Esparza and Jimenez urged the city to devote more funding to expanding the app’s services to multiple languages, especially Spanish and Vietnamese.

City staff said an update to the app, including expanding to other languages, is in the works, but exact timing of when residents will see changes is unclear.

There are also resource challenges. For instance, the city has several cameras it moves around town aimed at deterring residents from illegal dumping and, when they do, identifying people and fining them. Council members want more cameras, but each one costs $30,000, meaning getting more up and running is a slow process.

“We’ve really been kind of chasing the issue of blight,” said Angel Rios, deputy city manager. “But eventually we want to shift into a maintenance mode.”

In a move that the rest of the City Council endorsed, the mayor in his March budget message called for doubling the pilot program where homeless people clean up trash, and he’s proposed devoting more than $3 million in the city’s next budget to addressing the issue, which would help add staff to the team picking up dumped items and fund more grants to neighborhood associations. The council is scheduled to vote on the budget in June.

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Beta slows, continues to soak several Southern states But there is also the challenge of figuring out how, adequate funding aside, to encourage residents to change their behavior and to tackle an issue that touches an array of city departments and agencies. Right now, some teams can clear trash in certain areas, but not go into others. The goal is to get to a point where the response isn’t so silo-ed, Rios said.

“I know we’ve got an awful lot of work to do, but we’ve made a lot of progress,” Liccardo said, adding that he thinks “it is so heartening” to see residents — from church youth groups to high school students to people multitasking while walking their dogs — volunteer to pick up trash.

“The war on blight is progressing strongly,” Liccardo said. “There is more to do.”

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