(The following article by Joseph Dee was posted on the Trenton Times website on April 15.)
TRENTON, N.J. — Train passengers know when they’re in the city and unfortunately it doesn’t take an announcement to get clued in.
All they have to do is look out the window and see mounds of household trash and construction debris spilling down embankments and onto the stone track beds.
City officials are asking Amtrak to clean up the mess, which they say is a chronic problem that damages Trenton’s public image.
“It’s their right-of-way,” said Renee Haynes, Mayor Douglas H. Palmer’s chief of staff. At a recent city council meeting, Haynes flipped through a stack of snapshots showing trash hotspots along the tracks. “We want them to establish a regular cleaning schedule.”
One spot not far from the Trenton train station is so strewn with plastic bottles that it looks like a makeshift recycling center. The embankments and tracks become noticeably tidier closer to the Hamilton station and beyond.
An embankment along Thompson Street, which hugs the tracks between Chestnut Avenue and Monmouth Street, is particularly littered, city director of inspections Leonard Pucciatti said.
“People are throwing debris over the fence, and someone cut the fence,” which has led to people dumping large quantities of junk there, he said. “We believe it’s outside people doing it, not the residents there.”
Haynes said the city’s initial contact with Amtrak was unsatisfactory.
“We’re looking for a much quicker response than the four to six weeks they’ve indicated,” she said. “If they don’t, we’re prepared to treat them as any other property owner and take them to court. We really wish they’d think about this as if it were in their back yard.”
Since Haynes said that last week, Amtrak and the city have had additional discussions. “I just spoke to (an Amtrak official),” Pucciatti said Thursday. “He’s coming here to meet with me Wednesday. They’re as concerned about the situation as we are.”
But the official hinted that Amtrak won’t want to spend a lot of money cleaning the tracks until it installs surveillance cameras to catch dumpers and fences to prevent them, Pucciatti said. “That won’t be until after October. We’re going to look to see how we can get them to start cleaning it now.”
Cleaning a site is expensive and futile, Pucciatti conceded, if there are no secure fences to prevent dumpers returning. “We spent $70,000 cleaning up the CSX railroad property on Oakland Street last year and already it’s becoming a problem again,” he said.
Nevertheless, Haynes said the problem must be addressed now. “The first message (the trash) sends is that the city and its residents and the mayor don’t care. It goes against everything we work for every day.”
Cliff Black, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the railroad will work with the city “to solve this problem for the benefit of both parties.”
He said dumping has been a problem at other locations along the Northeast Corridor, but said “taller fences and surveillance is a methodology that we’ve found to be effective. It has seemed to solve the problem in other regions, but funding is the key.”