Truesee's Daily Wonder

Janice Shanks carried two bags of trash into the office of Portsmouth Mayor David Malone on Friday morning, expressing her frustration with the mix-up of the trash pick-up schedule this week.

“We always have more (trash) than just ours,” Shanks said. “I don’t know what to do. It’s overflowing. We’re gonna be in a real pickle. It was the holiday weekend and all of our grandkids were there and our children, so I had more than normal.”

Shanks, who lives on Fourth Street, said she also has extra trash on a regular basis because students from Shawnee State University pull up and dump their fast food wrappers and cups onto a lot and it blows onto her property. She said her husband, Curtis Shanks, often has to clean the mess up.

Malone accepted the trash and apologized for the schedule mix-up and said he would take the trash to the Service Department.

“With it being a holiday, we tried to avoid paying overtime. Monday’s was picked up on Tuesday and then Wednesday we went to the regular days and regular route,” Malone said. “I guess there had been some confusion. I guess (City Service Director) Bill (Beaumont) put out a press release last week and didn’t even tell us. We had given them orders as to what we wanted them to do this week. Bill didn’t tell me he had put that press release out as a notice out to the residents. That brought confusion as to which route was going to be picked up. If Bill had stuck with what we had planned — what we had worked out for him — there would have been no confusion. Even when I told him what we needed to do to avoid overtime, if he had told me then, that he had already put a press release out the week before, then I probably wouldn’t even have enforced the plan we put in.”

Dr. Robert Nelson said the trash piling up at his office on Offnere Street is presenting a health hazard.

“It’s overflowing,” Nelson said. “You have vermin, flies; flies cause disease. There are rats and mice. I saw a dead mouse out here on the street. This is a health hazard. Why isn’t the Portsmouth Board of Health on this thing?”

A woman in the hilltop area of the city, who asked to remain anonymous, said she contacted the mayor’s office who told her they deliberately skipped her area and that the plan is to skip another area at the next holiday to prevent the need to pay overtime.

“I asked what we can do because our trash cans are overflowing, and we were told we could get a truck and take our own trash to the dump,” the woman said. “I said, since we had already paid through our water bill, could they give us a discount, a refund credit for one week.” She said they told her no. The woman suggested the city place Dumpsters in various parts of the city, and have the Dumpsters picked up during regular hours.