PACOIMA : Volunteers Boycott Cleanup Operation

All Ray Jackson wanted was a dumpster on the corner of Vaughn Street and Foothill Boulevard. Instead, he has a graffiti-scrawled orange velour love seat and a lot of frustration.

The abandoned furniture, graffiti and trash that mark streets of northeast Pacoima are proof to neighborhood activists such as Jackson that last weekend’s Operation Sparkle neighborhood cleanup didn’t glitter for them.

For two of the three years Operation Sparkle has been running, Jackson had asked the Los Angeles Police Department, which sponsors the event, to put a dumpster at the corner as part of the cleanup operation. Twice the department refused--saying it was unsafe or no dumpster was available. Each time, members of Jackson’s Northeast Community Improvement Assn. had volunteered anyway, working in other people’s neighborhoods.

This year, they boycotted.

“I told them what was happening, that we weren’t getting a dumpster, and they said the hell with it,” Jackson said. “We’re not going to work for nothing.”

The group is considering holding its own cleanup in the neighborhoods surrounding the Vaughn Street-Foothill Boulevard intersection, Jackson said.

Police said they chose another site, more than a mile west, because the traffic in Jackson’s choice was too heavy for volunteers to drop off garbage safely.

Tension surrounding the cleanup dates back to 1991, when neighbors dumped trash on a corner where the police had said there would be a dumpster. The dumpster arrived late, but the trash arrived early. “Since this was so new to us, we had no idea of the trash, and they overfilled it, and we couldn’t handle it,” said Sgt. John Hummel.

Media coverage of the mess gave the police a black eye--especially so because Operation Sparkle was part of the department’s attempt to regain community support after the Rodney G. King beating that occurred nearby.

The trash lingered in Jackson’s neighborhood for two days before officials carted it away. But the bitterness appears to have lingered longer.