LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock city directors will consider an ordinance Tuesday that would allow the city to deem apartment complexes and mobile home parks that don’t have trash pickup service as nuisances.
The capital city has long treated the two types of residential properties as commercial enterprises, meaning city trash trucks don’t stop to collect their trash. The property owners are responsible for hiring private waste haulers instead.
“There’s a number of them that do not provide trash pickup,” said City Director B.J. Wyrick, whose southwest Little Rock ward is home to dozens of mobile home parks and apartment complexes.
City officials believe that residents from some mobile home parks have resorted to dumping their trash in city trash cans at area parks.
“It’s not only a nuisance right there in the [mobile home] park where they don’t pick up, but in the city parks where they take it and put it,” at-large City Director Joan Adcock said.
It’s not known how many multifamily complexes in Little Rock don’t provide trash pickup.
Janice Rogers, an office manager for Southern Pines Mobile Home Park in southwest Little Rock, said the ordinance wouldn’t affect her park or others that she knows of nearby.
“We have Dumpsters all throughout the park,” she said of her facility. “All the ones I know of have Dumpsters, even the little one out here beside us has a Dumpster.”
Adcock doesn’t think there are any apartments in the city that don’t provide trash service but said she hoped the ordinance would be interpreted to declare apartments with undersized trash bins as nuisances as well.
Waste haulers don’t pick up bags of trash placed outside the trash containers, Adcock said.
“And then there are dogs that get into it at night, and we have it all over the street and over the neighborhood,” she said. “I don’t care if it’s one or two days a week, the neighborhood shouldn’t have to see trash blowing around.”
City Attorney Tom Carpenter said the ordinance could apply to those types of situations because the ordinance would say that apartment complex owners are responsible for the sanitary conditions of the premises and for the “proper” storage and containment for waste.
By declaring something a nuisance, the city could then go to court and ask a judge to shut down a facility that doesn’t comply.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/05/2011