Cleaning Up Downtown Red Bank

At times, Red Bank’s downtown can be unsightly.

Take a glance at the sidewalk, especially around a trashcan or two, and you’ll likely find an assortment of litter. Some of it’s relatively new, some of it distinctly not so. Everything from cigarette butts, to bottles, to, if you’re going to qualify it as litter, dog feces.

At the borough’s council meeting Monday night, Councilman Arthur Murphy made it clear that messy sidewalks and trashy gutters will no longer be tolerated now that the snow, along with any excuses, is gone.

“It’s got to be a joint effort,” he said. “We do have a problem.”

As for who’s responsible for the litter problem, well, that depends on the person you ask. Some say tenants living above downtown storefronts are emptying their garbage into the sidewalk trashcans. Other say irresponsible business owners are taking bags of trash out of their shops and stuffing them in the cans.

It could also be, according to some, lazy pedestrians who aren’t willing to cross the street to throw their garbage out or simply don’t care to.

In reality, it’s probably a little of all three.

“I’ve seen people from businesses take their little white bags out there and throw them in the trash,” Murphy said. “We have to round everybody up, whether it’s the store owners, or whether it’s the tenants.”

Mayor Pasquale Menna put the onus on the RiverCenter, saying the problem persists, in part, because the group, which promotes Red Bank’s downtown businesses, hasn’t allocated funds for a sweeping service.

From the crowd, RiverCenter Executive Director Nancy Adams disputed Menna’s claim, saying the organization pays someone for 20 hours a week to clean its sidewalks.

Kathleen Gasienica, an American Littoral Society trustee, also deflected blame away from RiverCenter. A problem, as she sees it, is that there aren’t enough trashcans located in the right spots.

There’s also a distinct lack of recycling bins and as a result many cans and plastic bottles end up in the street and in sewer drains, she said.

“RiverCenter can’t handle the whole problem because a lot of it is litter from pedestrians,” she said.

Sure, there’s plenty of blame to go around – at a council meeting last month one business owner also called out the borough’s Department of Public Works for not emptying the trashcans regularly enough – but Murphy has an idea about how to amend the problem in the interim.

“If it’s outside your store,” he said. “Clean it up.”