Jackson County residents gear up for assault against unsightly roadsides
If Lisa Muscillo has a superpower, it’s probably her ability to zero in on roadside litter, no matter how well it’s hidden or how high the speed limit.
“I see the litter in high definition,” she said. “Every little piece sticks out to me. I can drive at 70 miles an hour. I see every little pin, every everything.”
If she had a second superpower, it would probably be the tremendous energy with which she attacks those unnatural problems she sees while zooming along the highway. To Muscillo, litter isn’t just a minor annoyance. It’s an evil, an unrighteous wrong scarring the face of her home, Jackson County.
“I’m totally obsessive-compulsive, and this has become like an addiction with me,” she said. “I feel like a crackhead. All I think about is litter.”
Muscillo had resolved to “give it my all” between the first of the year and April, when things typically start picking up at her Cashiers-based cleaning business. She’s been going out at least three times a week, filling bags with everything from McDonald’s wrappers and plastic bags to beer cans and needles.
Part of that cleanup has been in conjunction with the Watershed Association of the Tuckasegee River, which with its partners has picked up 2,400 pounds since January.
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“When I say ‘2,400 pounds since January,’ much more has been picked up than that,” said Roger Clapp, WATR’s executive director. “That’s just the little bit that I’ve chased behind and put in my truck.”
The stuff he hauls himself he has weighed before dumping it, while the orange bags left for the N.C. Department of Transportation to pick up aren’t counted in the figure.
With those numbers, it’s undeniable that litter is a problem in Jackson County, Muscillo and Clapp said. That’s why they enlisted some state-level expertise in the form of Mike Causey, DOT Adopt-A-State-Highway coordinator. Causey came to talk trash with a gathering of concerned citizens at the Jackson County Administration Building last week.
“Twice a week I take garbage bags, boxes and pick up all the beer cans thrown on the highway,” County Commissioner Charles Elders, who lives along a main road, told the gathering. “I have been mowing, watching as I go and — kathung — a can or two will land right in front of or behind me, so it is a problem.”
In addition to representatives from the county, Sylva, Dillsboro and Webster, the meeting drew a smattering of private citizens, mangers from Ingles stores in Sylva and Bryson City, Adam Bigelow of the Tuckaseigee Trash Mob, Barbara Hart of Swain Clean and Sarah McVeigh of the local Adopt-a-Highway program.
“I thought the meeting was excellent,” Clapp said. “I think we’ve still got a long way to go to enlist the kind of broad support we need to really make a dent into the trash.”
Causey talked about some different ways to do that.
Keep N.C. Beautiful, an organization supporting litter education programs, is one way to go, as is further support of the Adopt-a-Highway program in which individuals or groups take responsibility for keeping a 2-mile stretch of road in their community clean. In Jackson County, there are 69 unclaimed sections.
A lot of the trash comes from uncovered pickups, blowing out accidently as the vehicle gathers speed on the road. In Sampson County, Causey said, commissioners decided to address that issue by instituting a $25 fine for trucks that came to the dump without a tarp covering their load. The ordinance didn’t quite work as planned.
“Whatever you do there’s going to be a kickback. There’s unintended consequences,” Causey said. “The kickback was some people said, ‘I’m not paying the fine’ and they dumped their trash on the side of the road.”
To catch those people, there’s always the option of effective though expensive camera traps, and the state also has a Swat-a-Litterbug program, which allows citizens to call in the license plate numbers of people they’ve seen littering. Though the state can’t levy a fine from those reports, it can send an intimidating-looking letter letting the person know they’ve been seen and advising them of what could have happened had they been caught by an officer.
“Now that I have a smartphone, I’m really increasing my Swat-a-Litterbug,” Hart commented, advising Causey that she was probably the person who’d been blowing up their phone lines in the western counties.
Everyone in the room agreed that litter was a problem, and though Causey was clear that it’s an issue everywhere, not just in Jackson County, the group was adamant that the status quo isn’t acceptable for their home.
But what to do about it?
“We need to work at a number of different scales,” Clapp said.
Encouraging people to adopt one of the unclaimed sections of state highway would do a lot, and coordination with Swain Clean, the anti-litter group Hart is part of, would probably help both groups. Having a presence at events such as Sylva’s Greening up the Mountains and Western Carolina University’s Tuck River Clean Up would help. But as well as worker bees, Clapp would like to see more leaders come to the forefront so he can go back to focusing on litter and other issues in streams, rather than hopping over the banks and up to the roads.
Shaking up the masses is always quite a job, but going forward Muscillo and Clapp can expect some support from the county as well.
“We’re willing to look at allocating some funds in the budget to assist with this problem, and I think we would very much like to look at it from an education perspective,” Wooten said, adding that Keep N.C. Beautiful and programs in the schools might be a good place to start.
“We have to have a mindset change in folks,” he said. “They have to take pride in their community.”
Give a hand
Want to help fight the war against litter in Jackson County?
• Enlist. Contact Lisa Muscillo at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 828.331.8626.
• Report. If you see someone littering, call in the license plate number to the N.C. Department of Transportation at 1.877.368.4968 (DOT.4YOU). www.ncdot.gov/doh/operations/dp_chief_eng/roadside/beautification/litterbug/
• Train. Learn more about litter and prevention efforts at www.keepncbeautiful.org.
