Lack of common sense
We’ve got a new mayor. We’ve got a new Parks and Recreation director. So, things have changed. There is however something that has not changed at Salt Pond County Park. That is the lack of common sense. Maybe it has left the area with the last park attendant when he had moved on.
This lack of common sense is most obvious in the way the cleaning is done. Since it is a camping site, too, and quite well attended, plus the campers are generally early risers, their first trip is to the bathrooms. The bathrooms at the northern end, where no campers’ tents are set up, have been closed for more than a year waiting for a new sewer line. There portable toilets are set up for God knows how long. Those are cleaned by the rental company’s staff.
The major problem is the work schedule of the park attendant, who sets her priorities not on getting the main pavilion’s toilets cleaned.
Every morning she goes first to the non-camping section of the park and using a long tong takes out the HI5 marked recyclable plastic bottles and cans, one-by-one, from the trash containers and puts them in her separate bag, and that’s how she proceeds slowly to the camping area to continue her collecting activity.
Why doesn’t she take the whole bag of trash out and throw it away? Only after she pau there and she has put her collection on her truck, starts to attend the bathrooms. The campers are already up and always wondering why the cans and bottles have higher priority than the hygiene of the bathrooms first.
Is there anyone in the Park and Recreation administration who has common sense and can show this attendant how to do it right and explain that the clean toilets reflect better on the entire island than the prioritized but tedious, one-one-by-one can and bottle separation?
Jeremy Apo, Hanapepe
