Category: Littering

Don’t Mess With Texas 2.0

Posted on by Don Ryan

The littering laws have changed September 1, 2017.  Here they are:

Littering is against the law and you can be fined up to $500 for trash less than or equal to five pounds or five gallons (as you may have seen on those blue Don’t mess with Texas signs). Repeat the offense, and you could face a fine of up to $2,000 and 180 days in jail.

It gets worse.

Discarding trash that weighs more than five pounds is considered illegal dumping and carries even steeper fines. In Texas, failing to cover your pickup-truck load is against the law and carries a fine of up to $200 for the first offense and $500 for repeat offenders.

Any law enforcement officer in Texas can enforce these laws.

These violations are Class C and B Misdemeanors, respectively. More than 5 pounds of trash can carry as much as a $2000 fine and/or 180 days in jail.

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More to the point, we have residents here who fall under these categories of littering/dumping. Someone dropped a twin bed mattress and box spring on our common property, not near their house, but dumped it where it most certainly does not belong. We have had problems with illegal dumping here for a while. The City does get involved and we will continue to pursue these individuals.

We spend a lot of man hours cleaning up trash tossed out on the parking areas and common property here.  Some of it comes from people driving though the complex using it as a “cut”.  Please help us keep our community clean and free from trash on the grass and parking areas.

Health and Safety, Littering

Putting Our Area’s Litter Into Perspective

Posted on by Don Ryan - 6 Comments

In an effort to qualify how much trash is throw out by homeowners, renters and their guests, I asked our guys to bag it up and set it aside. Over the course of 5 consecutive days, we picked up 5 contractor size bags of trash that our residents and guests intentionally tossed out onto our common areas.  The average contractor size bag holds approximately 9 cubic feet. That means we picked up 45 cubic feet of loose paper, plastic drink cups, fast food bags, candy bar wrappers, snack packages, discarded food,  and a variety of other trash that could have just as easily be thrown in the trash at the home of the originator.

To put it another way, the man-hours expended to try to keep the subdivision presentable amounts to around $30,000 per year picking up garbage from our common areas. This is money that could be better spent on other things. We sometimes have to send out two guys to pick up the grounds on Monday as the volume increases over the weekend.  All of this trash has an effect on our property values, and ties up both men and money that needs to be used for repairs, painting and other projects around the 22 acre subdivision.

If things do not improve over the rest of the year, we may need to look at an increase in assessment dues next year to compensate for the money spent to pick up grounds litter that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Information, Littering