West Hillhurst resident and Calgary writer Richard White said he was shocked to receive a City response that trash pickup along a busy northwest pathway could take months.
White, who posts his travels to the Everyday Tourist website, had posted directly to social media a follow-up question to the City of Calgary about trash pickup along a pathway in his northwest Calgary community that he’d submitted a 311 request for three weeks earlier.
The response he received implied that a clean-up could take several months.
“Unless the debris is causing a public safety issue it is considered the lowest priority and may take up to several months to be picked up. Thanks,” read the Calgary Parks response on the X platform (formerly Twitter).
It wasn’t the response that White had expected.
“I was shocked that they would publicly say that they really have no mechanism for cleaning up debris on public land,” he told LWC.
“I mean, as a citizen, I think we have the expectation that we should be able to walk in public places and not have to look at debris for weeks on end.”
White has a particular interest in this area because he tends to a garden at the end of the street where the pathway is located. He said parents with small children use it to reach an area daycare, and there’s a nearby 7-Eleven and a transit stop.
Anna Blaxley with Calgary Parks and Open Spaces confirmed they don’t have dedicated clean-up crews for city parks. There is a lot of public dumping in these parks, and it’s the city parks operational staff handling the waste removal. Further, she said a lot of people-power has been put into cleaning up the growing number of encampments across Calgary.
“We just don’t have the resourcing to have that amount of dedicated staff, but we do have kind of a seasonal cleanup in the spring where we see things that people might have decided to throw away in the winter, hoping that nobody would notice,” she said.
“We do dispatch staff if there’s issues. Unfortunately, with the amount of staff and the amount of work that we have both planned and requested, sometimes things do fall between the cracks, and this is one of those times.”
Resourcing is a common fallback: White
Blaxley said that staff pick up litter in city parks regularly, and it takes up a considerable amount of time.
“We don’t have just dedicated staff for that, and we just simply don’t have the funds and bodies to assign to it,” she told LWC.
“I think we can offer any service that folks you know are willing to fund. This is a delicate conversation. We have so many boots on the ground, and we have so many lines of budget, and there are a lot of services that we provide. Citizens want a lot of services, and we kind of have to prioritize that based on a number of different factors.”
White said he doesn’t buy the resource issue. He believes the City of Calgary has to do better with what they have. A recent experience in the Grand Trunk Park in West Hillhurst highlighted to him some of the inefficiency in how the city assigns work.
“There was one person who had to come for cleaning the gutter. There was one person that had to come to remove the trees,” he said.
“I realize I don’t understand all of the logistics, but it just seems to me that what they have isn’t working, and they can’t keep asking for more resources. They need to figure out a way to use the resources they have more effectively.”
White said he’s been very patient with requests. He knows they take time to respond to. He said the recent wind and rain storm in Calgary left branches and debris in the area park, and he knows it’s going to take a bit for the City to get to it all.
The seven-day window for response
Given the type of debris, White surmised that perhaps someone was sleeping rough in the area, maybe even using the spot as a toilet. While he said he often does a cleanup of his area park – litter, debris, etc – this wasn’t something he wanted to deal with. He was worried about the public health aspect, along with disturbing someone’s belongings.
That prompted the 311 request for help.
“I would think within a week or two weeks at least, that should be cleaned up, right? I don’t think that’s unrealistic,” he said.
Blaxley said they do try to “action” service requests within seven days. This one is 25 and counting and acknowledged that it fell through the cracks. Blaxley did confirm that they plan to take care of the site within the next week.
Ward 7 Coun. Terry Wong said when he saw White’s message and the subsequent response, he forwarded it to the Parks general manager immediately. He wanted it resolved “pretty damn quick” he said, and also to address the social media response.
He said juggling over parks and mobility jurisdiction on the cleanup doesn’t fly either.
“Any excuse to say we’re still in the reorg and trying to figure out who’s who in the zoo, that doesn’t cut the mustard anymore,” Wong said.
“We’re well beyond the reorg.”
Wong said that come Sept. 1 and into the upcoming November budget, he believes there will be some serious questions around Calgarians’ priorities, and what they want to be funded.
In the meantime, Blaxley said that they still want citizens to call 311 to report these issues, and they’ll respond as swiftly as they can. People can also access TLC kits from the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary, with gloves and garbage bags for community cleanups.
“That is kind of more of like a volunteer out of the goodness of your heart, but it’s not an expectation, absolutely not,” she said.
“We are here to deliver a service, and we do it to the best of our ability and our resources.”
