One man’s trash is an entire city’s nightmare

AURORA | For nearly 40 years, longtime Aurora resident and former city council member Nadine Caldwell has hosted an annual neighborhood spring cleanup in Northwest Aurora, where 285 paved and unpaved alleys exist.

One of those alleys lies just beyond Caldwell’s backyard and is often turned into a junkyard by passer-byers. 

“We had somebody this year dump a full-size carpet out of a living room with all of the padding,” she said. “They dumped it in the middle of the alley so you couldn’t drive through it. When I called up the city’s code enforcement, they sent out a forklift to pick it up.”

Caldwell doesn’t just organize an annual neighborhood cleanup out of the goodness of her heart. She does it as a way to minimize the large amount of illegal dumping that is otherwise rampant in the alleys of Northwest Aurora. For $10 — the cost to become a member of the Northwest Aurora Neighborhood Organization — residents can get rid of hard-to-dump items such as freezers, refrigerators, mattresses and sofas every May.

For the past two years, the number of items being illegally discarded in the city has increased, according to city records. In 2013, Aurora’s Neighborhood Support spent $3,800 to remove 49 illegally dumped items. In 2014, there were 67 items removed at a cost of approximately $6,000. This year, the number of dumped items went up to 115 and cost the city $10,819 to dispose of.

Ron Moore, interim director of the Neighborhood Services Department, said this year’s increase is largely a result of city code officers no longer removing the items themselves.

“There were too many injuries, we had to stop it,” Moore said. He added that it was also becoming too expensive to take large items — such as tires, furniture and mattresses — to nearby dumps.  According to Waste Management, it costs $55 to get rid of a carload of trash at the Denver Arapahoe Disposal landfill on South Gun Club Road in Aurora. 

Moore said the problem has been ongoing for decades and is difficult to solve because Aurora code enforcement officers and police officers often can’t identify whether an item was illegally dumped or just carelessly set out by residents, which is also an infraction under city code.

“It’s a tough nut to crack because people are not out there watching,” Moore said. He said the city has worked on getting more money from the general fund to pave North Aurora alleys and also add more lighting in alleys as mitigating efforts.

He said that residents do not get fined if illegal trash is found on or near their property, but usually just a notice of violation.  He said from there, residents who receive a violation can call the city’s neighborhood services to have the issue investigated.

In September, the city held its first Aurora Cleanup Day as one way to deal with the problem. According to city staff, there was a total of 135 tons of trash hauled off in 45 dumpsters across the city, for an average of 3 tons of trash each.  For the event, dumpsters were placed in each of the city’s six wards.

This year the Northwest Aurora Neighborhood Organization, or NANO, which Caldwell founded, also collected and removed 42 tons of trash from north Aurora as part of its separate annual cleanup day.   

“We recycled two truckloads of metal items,” Caldwell said. “We also rented a truck for the day to go through the alleys and pick up items such as mattresses, furniture, anything and everything. They made 20 trips.”

And the City of Aurora offered its first Neighborhood Beautification Grants in 2015. Among the projects funded in Ward I were the NANO cleanup, and the new “Block Meisters” program, where an assigned group of neighborhood volunteers clean up a three-block area of north Aurora weekly.

The Neighborhood Beautification Grant Program will return in 2016, and information and applications will be available in early January, according to city staff.