Letter: Let’s help keep our parks clean

As my dog and I arrived on a recent Friday morning at Lower Scholl Park I met a city parks employee picking up trash that had spilled out of a plastic trash can. He said the can most likely had been overturned by a coyote. Another more substantial trash bin was surrounded by waste. Crows, he said, had picked the trash out of it, since it had no lid.

The employee asked me whether I had been at Lower Scholl on the previous Friday morning when the park was a total mess. I remembered that day. When I arrived, I found one parks employee surrounded by trash piled up everywhere. He was phoning for reinforcements and dozens of more trash bags. He said a couple of buses had brought young school children for an end-of-school-year party.

I left the heavy lifting to the park employees and took one of the trash bags to the fringes where I can always count on finding numerous empty beer cans, pop cans, junk food wrappings, cigarette butts, matchbooks and empty vials marked “medicinal cannabis,” along with other trash.

These two Friday mornings highlight several facts about our city parks:

1) They are not neighborhood parks; they are regional parks heavily used by people from other parts of the city and from other communities.

2) Not enough city employees are available to monitor the parks and maintain them properly. I worry that the young people who hang around the fringes at Lower Scholl will some day, by accident, set fire to Glenoaks Canyon.

3) Not enough resources are available to ensure that the parks are equipped appropriately.

Gerry Rankin
Glendale