Ross Eadie wants Winnipeg to clean up its act.
The longtime city councillor for the Mynarski ward says he’d rate the municipal government’s work so far this year as “fair,” docking points for a number of “troublesome” issues — particularly the preponderance of garbage on city streets.
“Ultimately we have some serious problems…. There’s too much garbage, too much garbage everywhere,” Eadie told Global Winnipeg.
“I’m working at trying to resolve that and hopefully can do it, but when people come to Winnipeg, what do they see? They see litter and garbage everywhere.”
The issue, Eadie said, isn’t limited to his own north Winnipeg neighbourhood or the inner city — it’s everywhere.
“It’s not just poor people down Main Street who are doing it,” he said. “There’s litter everywhere. Don’t litter. It’s awful, stop doing it.”
Coun. Cindy Gilroy (Daniel McIntyre) said she agrees with Eadie about the garbage issue, and it’s something council is trying to get a handle on.
“We’re having major issues around some apartment buildings that aren’t keeping their spaces clean, but also people that are homeless that are addicted, that have mental health issues going through garbage…. We’re having major issues with cleanliness in the back lanes in and around my ward,” Gilroy said.
“We are actually working on a solution. The city’s working on a garbage plan, looking at the inner-city neighbourhoods, looking at the high areas where we see a lot of garbage, and how we’re going to manage that.”
Gilroy said the city has reached out to the province to help with resources.
Last week, Take Pride Winnipeg said the city has seen a small bump on the annual litter index, with discarded cigarette butts as the main culprit — amounting to 30 per cent or more of the overall litter.
“Our annual litter index was up slightly this year, but it is getting a lot better than it was. There’s still so much out there and cigarette butts are the number one cause,” said Tom Ethans, the organization’s executive director.
“When I go to schools and (do) presentations, I say to the students, ‘If everybody in Manitoba walked outside today, took 30 seconds and picked up a piece of litter, that’s 1.4 million pieces of litter off the ground.’
“It doesn’t take much to make a difference.”
The most litter-filled areas of Winnipeg, according to the Take Pride survey, are the northwestern part of town, followed by the West End, downtown and north-central Winnipeg.
Fort Rouge/Fort Garry and southwest Winnipeg, on the other hand, scored the lowest on the litter index.
Ethans said the city is also plagued with graffiti, with workers and volunteers struggling to keep up with cleanup efforts.