The late-April storms and Fiesta celebrations have passed. Here is what they left behind beyond the view of most San Antonians who believe city cleanup crews on parade routes took care of the city’s annual litterfest:
All along the 8.5-mile Mission Reach in San Antonio, the landscape is now defaced with what appears to be a record tonnage of litter: A soggy Fiesta crown of garlanded paper flowers caught under a bridge, an empty laundry basket hanging from a tree branch, an orange traffic cone bobbing in a kayak chute, a discarded guayabera caught in the rocks, a raft of floating plastic bags, beer cans and water bottles in the water just south of Confluence Park, and green riverbanks tattooed with confetti as far as the river reaches in the city. Most of the litter is plastic.
Laura Mayes, a city spokeswoman, told the San Antonio Express-News last week that nearly 5,000 staff hours and $500,000 in taxpayer money would be spent on the cleanup after the Battles or Flowers and Fiesta Flambeau parades. The deeply pocketed nonprofit Fiesta Commission is not invoiced for those costs.
One of the critics responding to my column last week asserted that everyone had a great time at Fiesta, while the post-festival cleanup left the city unaffected. He could not be more wrong. I wish everyone in the city could spend an hour walking the San Antonio River with its waters, banks and foliage awash in record levels of litter to gather some perspective.
Would we want prospective visitors and potential future residents to see photographs of the river in this condition? Do we want continuing human indifference in the guise of the city’s biggest party to pollute the landscape, year in and year out, after spending years and $384.1 million on the San Antonio River Improvements Project?
I’ve never seen the Mission Reach ecosystem so impacted by the litter washed downstream from neighborhoods and city streets through sewers and storms. The San Antonio River Authority (SARA) relies on hourly wage contractors to painstakingly gather the litter from the water, riverbanks, dense vegetation, and trees and bushes, all multiplied like fishes and loaves along the linear park south of downtown.
Katye Brought, SARA’s spokeswoman, said the authority will spend an estimated $77,000 and three weeks with staff and contractors working together to restore the Mission Reach. That cleanup also will be paid for with tax dollars.
A SARA work crew was busy this past week cleaning the Eagleland Reach of the river just south of King William and below the Blue Star Arts Complex. That’s, perhaps, a quarter to half mile of the affected waterway and green spaces. I’ll be impressed if crews manage to complete the job in only three weeks, when the damage was done in a matter of days and nights. The photos in this column were taken Friday afternoon, evidence that the job ahead remains a big one.The impact on wildlife, on land and in the water, will be less visible but no less impactful..
The River Warriors, SARA’s citizen volunteer corps, also will aid in the cleanup.
It would be fitting for Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and San Antonio River Authority General Manager Derek Boese to come together to address the city’s culture of littering and prescribe the necessary carrot-and-stick strategies to address this perennial problem.
The Don’t Mess With Texas campaign, now 38 years running, has gone a long way toward cleaning up the timeless Texas tradition of throwing empty beer bottles and just about everything else out of vehicle windows along state roadways. The pop culture approach to the problem has helped make it clear that littering is not cool. The long-running campaign has led people to be their better selves.
We need a similar campaign, well-designed, adequately funded, and sustained over a period of years. It needs to include school messaging. Past U.S. surgeons general found it effective to take their “cigarette smoking causes cancer” message into schools. Fewer children for several generations took up smoking and many went home to urge their parents to quit.
Even then, local leaders will need to devote far greater resources to cleaning up the accumulated litter in the San Antonio River and more than 100 miles of the Howard Peak Greenway Trails System and its many creeks.
The nonprofit River Aid San Antonio, formed two years ago to address the city’s litter crisis, is now conducting multiple cleanup efforts every month, relying on a few sponsors and a core volunteer group. On Saturday, the volunteers met at the Tobin Trailhead on Salado Creek for a post-storm cleanup. The day’s yield will be measured in thousands of pounds of collected litter, with the help of the city’s Public Works and Parks & Recreation staff.
If physical limitations or other factors prevent you from participating in a cleanup, you can make a difference by making a tax-deductible donation.
Will local leaders rally people to the cause? I don’t know. To date, it has not been a priority, although I have nothing but praise for city and river authority cleanup crews.
Progress will not be measured by the size and frequency of cleanup crews on San Antonio’s river and creeks, but rather by the reduced need for them. That means addressing the root causes of why people litter.
