Vanessa Smith strolled down Center Street, zig-zagging through the obstacles of rubbish on a walk around the Fort Hill neighborhood Monday afternoon.
She passed by a pile of baby dolls and scattered VHS tapes, stacks of discarded mattresses, bags of household trash and no fewer than three dozen tires dumped out on the stretch of road near Gray Highway.
“This is an improvement compared to what I have seen,” the 55-year-old said, noting Center Street is sometimes nearly impassable in a car. “I need to drive like two or three miles per hour going through here because you couldn’t get by.”
Illegal dumping is a problem District 3 Commissioner-elect Stanley Stewart said needs to be solved.
“We’ve got to come up and put our minds together, our heads together, and figure out a way to keep this from happening,” Stewart said.
Center Street is among 20 illegal dumping sites the county cleans up periodically. However, the clean roads never seem to last long.
Within an hour of county crews clearing the street Tuesday morning, someone drove up in a truck and dumped a few dozen tires, county spokesman Chris Floore said.
How the county deals with trash has changed over the past decade.
The county’s Walker Road Landfill reached capacity and was permanently closed in August 2021. The closure came years after publicly-operated trash collection services were privatized with the 2014 consolidation of city and county governments.
In the absence of a municipal landfill or public trash service, Mayor Lester Miller planned to open five “convenience centers” where residents could drop off trash at no cost. So far, only three of the five are open.
The first one opened in 2022 on 11th Street near the closed landfill. A second one opened in south Macon at 4214 Fulton Mill Road and a third one opened in west Macon at 1520 Ninadel Drive.
“They’ve been hugely successful and they stay busy on the weekend,” Floore said of the convenience centers.
There’s no timeline yet for when the remaining two convenience centers might be constructed or where they might be located.
“We’ve got to find a good place that has good ingress and egress because we still have to get our big trucks back there to get the dumpsters,” Floore said. “It’s not just finding the location, we also have to find the staffing.”
County code enforcement sets up deer cameras in areas where illegal dumping is an issue. It also places signs warning of the consequences of being caught.
To contact Civic Journalism Fellow Laura Corley, call 478-301-5777 or email [email protected].
