A group of city workers and volunteers spent the afternoon cleaning massive amounts of trash from a wooded hillside in Watsonville one sunny day in early December, hauling away several full dumpsters.
“It’s a hot mess,” said Sally-Christine Rodgers, who founded the Pitch-In Initiative about two years ago, a countywide effort to eliminate litter and illegal dumping.
“Our goal is to raise awareness about litter in our community, and to make Santa Cruz County the cleanest in the state,” she said.
The abandoned campsite had long been a problem for neighbors who live adjacent to the hillside, which runs parallel to Main Street at the entrance to Highway 1, Rodgers said.
“And you can see the volume of trash and garbage, human waste, mattresses, bath tubs, shopping carts… it goes on and on,” she said.
And sites like this are not merely eyesores, she said. It’s also detrimental to wildlife and the county’s wildland areas, she said.
“This is pollution that is going to affect all of us,” she said.
“This is costing our taxpayers thousands and thousands of dollars and it’s money that could be better spent.
the Pitch-In Initiative was created by The Trash Talkers Coalition, a sizable group made up of nonprofits, governmental and law enforcement agencies and others.
Rodgers says she saw numerous organizations addressing the issue of litter, but few of them collaborated with each other.
This includes the offices of Congressman Jimmy Panetta, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, Assemblyman Robert Rivas, Senator John Laird, Santa Cruz, the cities of Watsonville, Capitola, Santa Cruz and Scotts Valley, CalTrans, Santa Cruz County Community Foundation, the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, the California Highway Patrol and the Santa Cruz County County Office of Education in addition to several schools.
The group has monthly meetings, during which members hone the ways in which they deal with the problem of litter.
For information, visit pitchinsantacruz.org/