Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti launched an initiative Thursday aimed at cleaning up the city’s trash-strewn streets, sidewalks and alleys.
Standing in a Pico Union alley where 13 tons of illegally dumped trash was removed in recent days by sanitation crews, Garcetti signed an executive order and laid out the framework of a $9.1-million “Clean Streets Initative.”
“Everybody who lives here, who works here, who visits here should be able to walk the streets of our city free of litter and debris,” Garcetti said.
His order instructs the Bureau of Sanitation to install 5,000 new trash cans over the next four years. With 1,000 current receptacles, L.A. lags far behind other large cities in the number of city-operated trash cans. Each additional can will result in two tons less litter on city streets each year, Garcetti said.
A key part of the initiative is to develop a data-driven rating system to measure the cleanliness of every street in the city. The current goal is to build such an inventory of the city’s roughly 70,000 street blocks by the end of the year. Garcetti said this task can be accomplished with five full-time inspectors.
Cities including New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia use street rating systems. Based on photographic sampling of streets and sidewalks, street cleanliness measurements in New York improved to more than a 90% acceptable rating last year, compared with 53% in 1980, according to a city report last year. (Full story at LA Times)
