Park maintenance could be better
Park maintenance could be better
The leadership has changed last year on Kauai. We have a new mayor and new department heads. So does the Parks and Recreation Department. It might be for the better, but the results will speak for themselves. Certainly not much has changed in the area of maintenance at Salt Pond Beach Park. The attendant who has been there for many years is still doing her nonsense things during her working hours all day.
While the park is in dire need of cleaning and repairs, the attendant rather spends most of her time on sorting the trash all day long. She stops at every trash can, she removes the filled and half-filled trash bags from the beaten-up aluminum trash cans, then with a long tong sorts out the HI5 redeemable cans and bottles into a separate trash bag. Then she takes them to her own car.
The other recyclables, like cardboard, glass and metal cans without HI5, are not separated, but removed from the plastic trash bags and dumped into the bins together with the miscellaneous trash at the parking lot at the entrance to the main pavilion.
The used trash bags are washed and replaced into the trash cans by her. It is quite inefficient and non-hygienic. Is our county so poor that they cannot afford plastic trash bags at Salt Pond Beach Park, but they can afford using new ones at other parks?
If the county had assigned the task of this unique HI5 recyclable-separation to the attendant during her regular working time, why not separate the non-redeemable recyclables, too, and deposit those at the green collection containers on Lele Road very close to the park? That’s a county project, too.
Perhaps the county should rotate its park supervisors to see what we see every day if the current one did not notice it yet.
John Kennedy, Hanapepe
