Every day, Jeff Cooper heads out on his two-mile walk along Fir Mountain Road with a bundle of empty grocery bags. When he returns, those bags are full of old beer cans, fast food containers, and other assortments of trash that he found littered along the side of the road during his walk. More than once he’s had to turn back early to get more bags — or his pickup — to collect all of the trash he finds during his walk.
Cooper, who has lived in the Fir Mountain area for 11 years, started picking up trash after he retired from the Tualatin Valley Fire Department two and a half years ago. “I’m getting to that point where I have some capacity and energy to focus on something like this,” he said. “No one else is going to.”
Aside from the trash Cooper is able to pick up, the shoulders of Fir Mountain Road are littered with piles of old tires and other large items that Cooper can’t remove on his own — including car seats, deck railings and piles of tires.
Across the county — on Kingsley Road — Ken Hall reports finding piles of trash, tires, file cabinets, toolboxes and two boats dumped on the side of the road within the last two weeks.
“First off, it’s unsightly,” said Hall of the trash dumped off the edge of the road. “Is this how we want Hood River to be seen? As a dumping ground?”
The times Hall has confronted somebody actively dumping along Kingsley, Hall said that the person dumping typically says that a friend told them it was okay to dump there.
“I have only lived on Kingsley for four years, but the old timers tell me this area used to be where locals went to dump their junk in the woods,” Hall said. “Now it’s no longer just locals, it’s friends of locals who heard you could just go dump unwanted items over the shoulder.”
Hall and a neighbor recently spent a couple of days hauling up some of the larger items over the embankment for easier removal, but more often than not — unless the trash is an immediate road hazard or safety concern — it takes days or weeks for Public Works or the Department of Forestry to orchestrate disposal.
“We try to clean things up in a fairly timely manner because otherwise it tends to be provocative,” said Forestry Director Doug Thieses. With items that can be traced back to an owner, like the two boats Hall discovered off of Kingsley, Oregon statutes require that the local government go through a process to notify the owner before it can be moved. “By the time we go through that, it’s weeks, and by then it’s been vandalized,” said Thieses. “It’s unfortunate that we can’t just haul it off sometimes.”
Getting rid of items that are provably garbage is technically easier, Thieses said, but the time and cost it takes to properly dispose of them is still a barrier.
“It’s frustrating too because resources are tight, and we have that dumped on us,” Thieses said, “and we get stuck with the bill, basically.”
The Hood River Recycling & Transfer Station charges $18.42 per cubic yard of household trash, $16.01 per regular appliance, $37.21 per refrigerant appliance, $3.15 for a standard tire (metal rims removed) and $9.98 for a truck tire (metal rims removed).
If they can, Forestry relies on the Hood River County Sheriff’s Office to enforce dumping regulations and remove trash, but the Sheriff’s Office is short-staffed as well: The department reduced its patrol coverage from 20-hours to 12-hours per day back in October, and the county recently approved a levy proposal for the May ballot specifically to improve public safety services.
The County Public Works department has generally refrained from putting up “No Dumping” signs because, said Public Works Director Mikel Diwan, “As a policy … signs don’t really mean anything if you can’t enforce it.”
Public Works, which is responsible for maintenance of county roads, buildings, bridges and equipment, as well as management of the county engineering, surveying, and parks offices, currently employs 21 people and, Diwan said, doesn’t have the staff or time availability to prioritize a response to dumping that isn’t causing a road hazard or safety issue.
“We obviously don’t like it (dumping), there’s way too much of it, but unfortunately, response has dropped significantly on our priority list over the years,” he said. “We prioritize what we get to … dumping just never gets to the top of the list.”
Cooper is working with the County Probation Department to have community service workers start picking up trash along Fir Mountain, as is already the case on Kingsley, but Cooper said that there’s little they can do about larger items, such as the pile of 40-50 tires building up a couple of feet from the roadway, because of the time and cost of dealing with it.
“I would ask that people understand that we do care about the road system and we do care about the appearance of the road,” said Diwan, adding that Public Works does still encourage people to report instances of dumping so that they can keep track.
Hall and Cooper encourage people to stop dumping altogether.
“These county roads aren’t dump sites, people, let’s quit acting like a bunch of hillbillies,” said Hall.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t appreciate how beautiful Hood River is,” said Cooper. “All I want is for people to be respectful, have an appreciation.”
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