It's a dirty business, illegal dumping. A newly hired environmental detective, though, is on the case.
By DAVID DONALD
Published December 31, 2003
ST. PETERSBURG - A police officer, searching for clues, sifts through a mountain of trash dumped in an alley.
Wearing rubber gloves, he inspects and pushes aside broken cabinets, scraps of metal and molding, an old wooden table with broken legs, papers, mattresses, box springs and cardboard boxes of kitchen garbage and assorted cast-offs, including broken baseball bats, scattered baseball cards and foreign coins. He is looking for a name, an address, anything that could provide a clue to the person who left this mess.
Suddenly, there is a break, a possible lead.
He finds some papers that had been ripped apart. He pieces them together like a jigsaw puzzle and discovers a woman's name. The name is traced through one of the computerized databases maintained by the police. It's a nickname of an elderly woman who lives with her husband on St. Petersburg's north side. The officer contacts them and finds out that they had hired a man to clean out their garage.
The husband identifies part of the trash in the alley as the stuff the man hauled away from their house. That case of illegal dumping, which occurred last summer behind a convenience store on the city's north side, resulted in charges against a self-employed handyman. It is an example of what the city expects will be happening more and more in the coming months, especially in the Midtown area where illegal dumping has become a big and expensive problem.
Charles Krickler, the officer who tracked down the handyman, was named in October to the city's newly created position of environmental detective.
The city hired Krickler to fight back against an increasing number of local contractors who pull their trucks and trailers into vacant lots, dead-end streets and alleyways, often under cover of darkness, and unload tons of trash, including excess building materials, broken concrete, roofing debris, old siding, and assorted other garbage and discards.
Illegal dumping is costing taxpayers a lot of money. The city paid $10,000 during a recent five-month period just in disposal fees to the Pinellas County landfill. This standard disposal fee is $37.50 per ton of trash. And that doesn't even count what the city paid to have its own sanitation workers clean up the more than 265 tons of trash on city time and use city vehicles to haul it to the landfill.
To carry out his new job, Krickler will be looking for clues, seeking help from residents and generally getting the word out to try to stop the illegal dumping going on around the city.
"I'm going to let people know I'm out there," Krickler said. "I always want them thinking in the back of their minds that every time they take a chance, it's like playing Russian roulette."
The biggest offenders are small commercial contractors and subcontractors who do home repairs and renovations and then save themselves time and money by illegally dumping the debris, said Ben Shirley, assistant director of the city sanitation department. These contractors often actually make money by doing this, because they bill the homeowner for the disposal fee charged at the county landfill and incinerator, located at 28th Street and 110th Avenue N, he said.
"You pay them to haul the stuff away, and they take it to the nearest vacant lot. They will find some secluded alleyway or lot and dump it, instead of driving all the way to the county incinerator," he said. The majority of illegal dumping is done in the Midtown area, he said. Indeed, city officials decided to fight back after seeing an increase in illegal dumping in Midtown over the past couple of years.
Much of the illegal dumping occurred on vacant plots of earth cleared by the city to create the Dome Industrial District on 22nd Street S, a few blocks from Tropicana Field.
After this area was cleared and fenced off, however, the illegal dumpers found other, more secluded places in Midtown to dump their trash. "It will be cheaper for the city to have a detective than to dispose of the material indefinitely," said Chuck Shauer, director of the city sanitation department.
The annual salary for the environmental detective's position is $39,000. Krickler said he is developing policies, procedures and guidelines for the new position, which is a part of the police department's economic crimes unit.
So far, there have been no arrests made in connection with some of the more serious commercial dumping offenses, but a few cases are being made and could not be commented on, he said.
"Once I catch them, they're going to be hit with a felony," he said. "It's going to cost them their truck, trailer and a lot of money."
Commercial dumping is a third-degree felony in Florida and can result in fines up to $5,000, five years in prison and the seizure of any vehicle used in the dumping, he said. This charge is used when the amount of trash exceeds 500 pounds or 100 cubic feet (for example, the size of four 25-cubic-foot refrigerators). One roofing job can generate trash weighing from one to three tons, said Shirley, of the city sanitation department.
In cases involving smaller loads, police can file the lesser charge of violating a city ordinance, a misdemeanor. This was done in the case involving the independent handyman who cleaned out the elderly couple's garage. The fine for this violation is $56, plus $18 per hour of police investigation time. The police may be conducting night stake-outs to catch some of the illegal dumpers, said Sgt. William Korinek, supervisor of the city police economic crimes unit. Krickler and Shirley are also planning to meet with residents to discuss the issue.
They will teach residents to write down the license plate numbers of the trucks involved in illegal dumping and the company logos on the trucks or the shirts of the drivers. In addition, the two city officials are starting an education program to prevent illegal dumping by educating people in how to properly dispose of trash. Krickler did that in a case last month involving the owner of a building on 22nd Street S who had hired men to pull debris out of his building. The men were piling it up on the sidewalk.
After talking with Krickler about cost-effective ways to dispose of the trash, the man agreed to have the city bring a trash bin to the site the next morning and haul away the debris.
The cost for this service, cheaper than hauling numerous loads to the county landfill, was simply added to the building owner's monthly sanitation bill.
"He then thanked me for explaining everything to him and making this a much easier process for him and his people," Krickler wrote in his report on this case.
"We want to let people know that at this point in the game, education is our key focus," said Korinek, who is Krickler's supervisor. "We want everybody to comply with the law and know what the laws are. We're looking to make this a positive thing for everybody concerned. Our basic goal is to clean things up."
- David Donald is a reporter for the Neighborhood News Bureau, a program of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
