Local government and businesses have rolled out the red carpet for river runners. Parks and Rec launched the Ride the River shuttle long before we had a public bus system. Sun Country Tours rents float tubes to families at Riverbend Park Beach. Tumalo Creek Kayak and Canoe has helped create a veritable SUP armada on the Deschutes.
As more tourists pour into Bend, they are packing in plenty of trash. Unfortunately, they’re not packing it out. Two weekends ago, the beach at Miller’s Landing was littered with deflated rafts and other detritus, prompting a lively discussion on social media about what should be done about it.
Parks and Recreation is responsible for the cleanup of park property, but they acknowledge that garbage removal doesn’t happen daily at all parks and trails, and when visitors don’t use designated garbage cans, it requires more time for the maintenance staff to clean it up versus doing other maintenance work.
The Deschutes runs through private property as well, and homeowners along the river are expected to clean up the mess that accumulates in their yards. Local volunteer groups host river clean-up events, but the day-to-day debris generated by river floaters isn’t any one entity’s responsibility. (See Angela Moore’s news story on page 7.)
Ideally, everyone would pick up after themselves, and we should certainly encourage everyone to do so. But signs reminding people that their mother doesn’t work here will only go so far. In order to keep the river clean, we’re going to need to put public resources toward cleaning up after the increasing number of river runners who have been lured here by slick marketing campaigns, convenient river shuttles, and easy-to-rent innertubes.
We can’t expect these visitors to “just know” where the trash bins are located along the river, or what to do with their rubbish once those bins have overflowed. What we can expect is escaped Crocs and Nalgenes, float-away flip-flops and beer bottles, and abandoned pool toys that sprang a leak on the lava rocks.
It’s easy to feel outraged when we see piles of trash lining the beloved Deschutes, and it’s convenient to blame the tourists who have discovered – and embraced—our perfect little drinking town with a mountain problem. But we’d be better off as a community if we stopped shaming visitors and assigned responsibility to clean up the mess that the floating hordes will inevitably leave behind.
Bend’s patchwork approach to river cleanup is clearly inadequate to address the growing trash problem. As a community, we need to pool our resources to ensure that a single entity takes responsibility, is held accountable, and has adequate resources to do the job. Bend Parks and Rec or the City of Bend should lead the charge and take responsibility for developing a funding mechanism to address this problem, whether it be a surcharge or bond measure. We should not continue to rely on individual do-gooders and property owners to do a job that rightly belongs to government.
This article appears in Jun 15-22, 2016.
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The fiasco at the “safe” floater passage and the whitewater park is evidence that it is time for new management at Bend Parks and Rec. Too much money and not enough planning is evident in this project and many others. It is time for the board to replace Don Horton with a qualified leader who can manage this larger parks district. It is not only that the “safe” floater passage isn’t remotely safe, and that the whitewater park is still dangerous, it is that Don Horton won’t admit that they even made mistakes. They promoted this as a safe passage to pass the bond, then changed it to just a passageway. He then blamed the taxpayers for not using good judgement and not having the proper floaties. On top of this there is the ongoing and ever changing plans for Mirror Pond, the ice rink that melts in the sun, and the Discovery Park pond that no one thought anyone would want to swim in. When this many projects are screwed up, the only blame is poor executive management. It is time for a change!
This Editorial points out the obvious: the City and Bend Parks & Rec have done all they can to attract, shall we say “all types of visitors” to the river as it runs through the city, but want nothing to do with the aftermath for the neighborhoods and areas that are affected by these visitors.
I agree that BPRD needs new leadership. Don Horton’s partisanship against removal of the Mirror Pond dam and cozy dealings with Bill Smith and other local real estate poobahs show that he’s been in there a bit too long.