State spends $4M to pick up 396,000 bags of roadside litter

By HANNAH K. SPARLING

The Cincinnati Enquirer

CINCINNATI

Ah, the open road. Sunshine. The wind in your hair. Miles and miles of – garbage.

Every year, the Ohio Department of Transportation picks up heaps and heaps of trash from the side of the road. In 2018, it was more than 396,000 trash bags full. And that’s just from interstates and U.S. routes outside of municipalities. It wouldn’t include, for example, any litter on streets owned and maintained by the city of Cincinnati.

It’s soggy cigarette cartons, empty Windex bottles, fast-food wrappers, chunks of Styrofoam, used straws, dirty diapers. “Pretty much anything you can think of, you’ll see it out here,” said Mitchel Horne, a 28-year-old highway technician who spent a recent 90-degree afternoon picking up trash with his ODOT crew.

Horne was carrying a bright orange, 40-gallon trash bag, which he usually fills up in about half an hour or so, he said. It’s routine to come across drug needles, purses that have been rifled through and tossed aside and “trucker bombs,” which are soda bottles filled with urine.

To put the 396,000 bags in perspective, it took state employees, inmates and Adopt A Highway volunteers more than 157,000 hours to collect all that garbage in 2018.

That’s 19,723 full work days.

And, it cost Ohio taxpayers $4.1 million.

“It’s a shame that ODOT has to spend as much time and money as it does picking up other people’s trash,” said spokesman Matt Bruning.

Bruning points to ODOT’s Safe Routes to School program, which also gets about $4 million a year.

“We could double that if we didn’t have to pick up litter,” he said. “Things like that just show how frustrating the problem is.”

ODOT keeps a surprisingly meticulous account of its trash, broken down by county, bags collected, time and money spent and who does the work.

Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, is the trashiest of the state’s 88 counties – or, perhaps it’s the cleanest, depending on how you look at it. ODOT collected more than 44,700 bags of trash from Cuyahoga County in 2018 alone. It cost more than half a million dollars.

Hamilton County is second, with 28,167 bags of trash in 2018, which cost $150,636 to collect.

In the Mahoning Valley – Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties – 17,611 bags of trash were collected.

Littering is against the law in Ohio, a minor misdemeanor, but the rule does not seem to be strictly enforced. In the past five years, Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers issued 818 tickets for littering, an average of 164 a year.

For speeding, they issued 1.9 million, or 373,660 a year.

It’s a never-ending cycle, said Horne, the highway technician. His crew will pick up trash one day, and the next, the very same stretch of highway will be littered anew.

Brian Cunningham, a public information officer for ODOT, said it’s amazing what people will just leave on the side of the road.

“These guys could be out fixing guardrail or potholes,” Cunningham said, gesturing to Horne’s crew. “But we have to deploy folks across the state to pick up other people’s junk.”