Junk Mail Deposit Rejected by City

Santa Monica resident Edwin Ek thought he was doing the right thing when he tossed some junk mail recently into a corner refuse barrel.

Instead, the city has branded him a civil sinner and is threatening to fine him if he ever again uses a public trash container for his private use.

In a June 26 letter, Thomas Q. Dever, the city’s superintendent of solid waste management, informed Ek that trash barrels placed on city streets “are only for litter produced by the general public.”

“You are to use only the trash containers provided at your address,” the letter stated, warning that future violations will result in Ek being billed $25 per violation.

In a telephone interview, Dever said he sends two or three such letters a week as part of an effort to keep the trash receptacles open for spur-of-the moment debris.

“What we’re targeting here are abusers,” he said, “not the person who is cleaning a gum wrapper out of her purse. Depending on whose definition of quantity you accept, some cases are marginal.”

Ek was caught, not in the act of using a trash can, but after an investigation by a city cleanup crew. They spotted his name on envelopes while sifting through the trash in a bin at San Vicente Boulevard and 4th Street, according to Dever’s letter.

They confiscated the evidence and sent a photocopy along to Ek--thereby creating an additional piece of trash, he noted. “This specimen represents just one of the numerous (pieces of) discarded mail that you put in the receptacle,” the letter admonished him.

For the record, the offending specimen was a sweepstakes offer from a stereo magazine.

Ek, 30, a financial consultant, said at first he found the letter from the city “just too amusing to be real” and wondered what would happen “if I threw their letter in the same bin to see what happened.”

Ek readily confesses that he tossed the sweepstakes letter and other junk mail in the can on the corner where he catches the bus for work every day.

As he tells it, he had taken along unopened mail from the day before to look at while waiting for the bus, and, finding some not worthy of perusal, he threw them away.

City officials contend that Ek actually deposited a bag full of trash, not merely a few letters.

But it probably doesn’t matter; Assistant City Atty. Joseph Lawrence said he was unaware of any ordinance that deals with the public’s use of city trash bins.

In response to inquiries from The Times, Santa Monica Director of General Services Stan Scholl said the city was taking “corrective action” on its policy concerning public trash cans.

Individual citizens such as Ek will no longer get letters from the city, Scholl said. Instead, the city will concentrate enforcement efforts on building owners who do not have enough dumpsters, which is what creates the problem, he said.

“That’s what we should have done in the first place.”