Lowndes County Board of Supervisors President Harry Sanders recalls a time when illegal dumps were as much a part of the rural landscape as fence posts and hay bales.
“What happens is one person finds an isolated road or pulls up to a bridge and throws stuff out,” Sanders said. “And if one person does it, other people see it and do the same thing. Before you know it, it’s a dump site. We’ve had situations where it has gotten so bad that we had to bring in an excavator to clear it up.”
Fortunately, that sort of blight is less common now, thanks primarily to a solid waste abatement grant from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.
The MDEQ on Thursday awarded Lowndes County a grant of $19,528 to combat the scourge of illegal dumping. Sanders said the county has been awarded the grant for the past nine years.
“It’s made a huge difference,” Sanders said. “We have a part-time employee who drives around the county looking for places where people have dumped stuff, anything from refrigerators to washing machines, basically anything that can’t be picked up by our garbage collection.”
The grant pays for the salary of the employee and the fuel.
“We have an old pickup we got from the sheriff’s department, so really the only costs are the pay and the fuel,” Sanders said. “I think it’s made a big difference. It’s still a problem from time to time, especially around the state line because the garbage collection in Alabama doesn’t pick up a lot of the things we pick up here in Mississippi.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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