Does the City need to realign sanitation services?

Redbankgreen has a good posting about the apparent increase of cigarette butts on the beaches of our area. Honestly, we at the LBA have never quite understood the fun of smoking on a hot beach but apparently environmentalists believe that many of the butts on the beach are not smoked on the beach but rather end up on the beach from points hither and yon.

Long Branch's public beaches have always seemed to be as good as expected but one has to wonder if they wouldn't be cleaner if the City adopted a new "clean city" approach. The clean city approach as the LBA envisions it, would adjust the city's employee-oriented approach to city sanitation and code enforcement and realign it to a goal-oriented approach.

The goals of sanitation should not just be to remove trash and litter but to leave the city cleaner and better looking than it was beforehand. The LBA hates the fact that there are pages of regulations about when trash can be placed, how it must be sorted, how it must be prepared and presented and the like but apparently no rules at all about how city employees approach the collection or conduct themselves in the execution thereof. Most side streets in the city look like the aftermath of an F5 tornado after the sanitation team gets done tossing garbage cans, recycling containers and the like back to the curb (if you are lucky) and down the street beyond your neighbors house in all likelihood.

This, as compared to the collection system in Ocean Township and Rumson Borough, where the sanitation teams are instructed to not only retrieve garbage receptacles from their place near or behind your home but to also return them, upright, to their original location. As a result, those towns look significantly cleaner on garbage days than Long Branch, even though the garbage from both communities was successfully collected from both communities, and the people walking down those streets are much more likely to maintain that look than they would be to throw trash on the street, as the LBA witnesses before our offices every single day.