Trash

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

At first glance, Pimlico Race Course 's infield didn't look quite as trash-filled as Yolanda Wade is used to seeing it the Sunday morning after the Preakness, despite record crowds this year. It was an illusion. With more tents than in previous years, there was more room for the detritus of 121,300 fans to hide, turning the annual clean-up into a kind of warped treasure hunt. The tents "camouflaged the trash," said Wade, a fill-in supervisor for Pritchard Sports & Entertainment who works at Pimlico and the Laurel Park racetrack year-round.

At first glance, Pimlico Race Course 's infield didn't look quite as trash-filled as Yolanda Wade is used to seeing it the Sunday morning after the Preakness, despite record crowds this year. It was an illusion. With more tents than in previous years, there was more room for the detritus of 121,300 fans to hide, turning the annual clean-up into a kind of warped treasure hunt. The tents "camouflaged the trash," said Wade, a fill-in supervisor for Pritchard Sports & Entertainment who works at Pimlico and the Laurel Park racetrack year-round.

A tot's discarded rocking horse has taken on an artful life and become a compelling symbol of a river befouled by debris. Towson University art students recently salvaged the toy, in two large chunks, during a volunteer clean-up along Back River in Essex. "When it came out of the river, it was scary, dirty and something like the swamp creature," said Vicki Miller, 19, of Parkton, during a class critique last week in anticipation of a trash art auction. But Olivia Moore saw in the yellowed, broken toy the potential to deliver an anti-pollution message.

The word is out and the anxiety is growing. In neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, neat and messy Baltimoreans are keenly aware that a decades-old, twice-a-week rhythm of their lives is about to be disrupted. Soon the garbage trucks that pick up their trash will clatter down their streets just once a week. Oh, another truck will come a couple of days later, but it will only take recyclables, those mostly non-offending papers, boxes, bottles and cans - not the crab shells, baby diapers, cat litter, moldy bread and bruised spinach you don't want sitting around for the week in between pickups.

Did politicians exempt themselves from the litter laws the same way they exempted themselves from the "do not call" list? The primary election was weeks ago, yet countless signs for those who lost remain, many illegally placed on public land. It's time for these signs to come down. At what point do they officially become litter? The offending campaigns should be fined. Steve Raskin, Parkton

The following letter was addressed to members of the Harford County Council. A copy was provided for publication. We attended Tuesday night's public hearing, and left before the meeting started. After reading about the passage of Bill 11-62 without County Councilman Dion Guthrie's amendment approved, we are very disappointed to say the least. We do not believe that a 500-foot buffer was too much to ask. We hope that the community in which you live is never faced with the possibility of a transfer station such as we might be faced with here in Joppa.

Kenny Driscoll asked Patty, his wife, to hand him his crutches. He didn't like what he was seeing and wanted to get out of his truck and take action. Mr. Driscoll is a retired Baltimore police detective who in 2002 lost the use of his left leg after tumbling down a ravine in North Baltimore while chasing a carjack suspect. Every Memorial Day, he and his wife visit his wife's uncle's grave in Oak Lawn Cemetery on Eastern Avenue. Charles Leroy Parker, known to everyone by his middle name, died four years ago. He was a Marine veteran who had served two tours in Vietnam.

Is it any mystery why Maryland and Baltimore in particular, are considered anti-business? The "living wage" bill proposed by City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke will certainly result in the closing of one retailer on Pratt Street downtown and possibly threatens the existence of current and proposed Walmart stores, meaning the considerable loss of jobs ("'Major retailers' would pay city's 'living wage' under bill," May 4). How can politicians be so arrogant as to decide that they can tell an employer how much they have to pay employees?

Having read several accounts of the problems encountered in finding a place to get rid of the oily trash collected during the Gulf cleanup, especially the burdens placed on neighboring states as well as inland Louisiana, it occurs to me that we currently have an ideal site for this trash which would relieve these southern states of the ecological damage they are currently suffering and will probably incur in the future. We have an unused waste site which will probably be unused for a good while, maybe forever.

I found Dan Rodricks ' commentary regarding DNA testing and the recent Maryland Court of Appeals ruling ("DNA: Why wait for an arrest?" May 3) to be quite interesting. He states at the end that he can't think of a good argument against his position that we should all give DNA samples to the authorities whether we have been accused of a crime or not. Well, Dan, I've also thought about how useful having a large repository of DNA can be. Unsolved crime and a city mayor on your back?

Two Harford County Council members are calling for a state investigator to examine circumstances surrounding the proposed transfer station in Joppa, including the county's move away from the waste to energy facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground. At Tuesday's Harford County Council meeting, Councilmen Dion Guthrie and Joe Woods defended their comments to The Aegis last week that Aberdeen Proving Ground garrison commander Col. Orlando Ortiz said it was the county that pulled out of a waste disposal agreement, not APG. Woods said he went into last week's meeting with Guthrie and Ortiz fully prepared to accuse the Army of not being a good neighbor, only to find out it was the county that was not a good neighbor.

Editor: I wanted to let you know that I am very concerned about the proposal to locate a Waste Transfer Facility in the 800 block of Philadelphia Road in Joppa. Numerous people living near the site have written to me expressing their concern and at times their outrage over the facility being placed in this location. They are worried about how so many large trash trucks coming and going will safely navigate that section of Philadelphia Road which is already very busy. They are concerned about noise, dust and potential contamination. Of course they are afraid their property values will plummet.  I couldn't state more strongly that their concerns must be addressed and their questions answered to the fullest. One family who owns a home and property next to the proposed site has lived in their home for over 50 years. The couple says they are heartbroken to think they must spend their retirement years dealing with all the problems they anticipate will come with a trash facility located so close to their home.

Anne Arundel County residents would see their property taxes increase under the $1.2 billion budget proposed Monday by County Executive John R. Leopold, but that would be partially offset by a drop in trash pickup frequency and fees. County workers, meanwhile, would see an end to furloughs but receive no raises. Leopold's spending plan for the year that begins July 1 includes boosting the tax rate from 91 cents to 94.1 cents per $100 of assessed value. For a home with an assessed value of $261,200, the forecast countywide average, taxes would go up by about $128 for the year, officials said.

Lower Susquehanna Heritage Greenway's 12th annual River Sweep, a volunteer shoreline and roadside clean-up in honor of Earth Day, will take place in Havre de Grace, Perryville, Port Deposit and on Garrett Island on Saturday, April 21. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m., with the clean-up taking place from 9 a.m. to noon, rain or shine. Volunteers will meet at 8:30 a.m. in one of five locations for registration: Tydings Park, Havre de Grace; Community Park, Perryville; Boat Launch (River Road)

It remains one two of the more bizarre and mysterious deaths in Baltimore -- two people on successive years, 2010 and 2011, plunged down a trash chute in the same downtown apartment building -- the Park Charles high-rise. And we still have no idea what happened in either case. Police called the first one -- of 30-year-old Harsh Kumar, an apparent accident. He worked for a technology company and attended Johns Hopkins University. But then came Emily Hauze, a 23-year-old Loyola University Maryland graduate.

Editor: Next Tuesday, Jan. 10, at 7 p.m. at the Harford County Board of Education building at 102 S. Hickory Ave. in Bel Air, the public hearing for the Solid Waste Transfer Station Bill 11-62 will be held by the County Council. This is a bill to make the County government inform the people that a solid waste transfer station is coming to their neighborhood. It details what sort of trash it will take, where the trash will be taken, how large a facility it will be, and how many trucks will be cruising your neighborhood.

Laurel city offices will be closed Monday, May 30 for Memorial Day. Trash and recycling usually picked up Monday will be collected Tuesday, May 31. Tuesday's collections will be Wednesday, June 1. There will be no scheduled special pickups Wednesday. Government offices in Prince George's, Howard and Anne Arundel counties will be closed Monday, May 30, and no trash or curbside recycling collections will be made. Trash and recycling collections will resume on the next regularly scheduled collection day.

Annapolis residents and some city officials are voicing concerns about a proposal by Mayor Joshua J. Cohen to reduce trash collection to once a week and cut the size of the city's sanitation workforce as part of his $95.4 million budget proposal. Under the plan, the city would continue to provide waste removal through the Department of Public Works but would scale back some services and eliminate six positions, mostly through attrition. The mayor said the annual household fee would drop by $48 to $378 annually — an 11 percent savings.

A New York woman died Monday, when the van she was driving sideswiped a trash truck and struck a tree in the Severn area of Anne Arundel County. Shirley Walker-Lloyd, 76, of West Islip, was driving north at 11:07 a.m. on Quarterfield Road near Myers Drive, when her van began swerving. She crossed the center line, hit the trash truck, swerved back to the north lane and ultimately drove off the road and struck a tree, police said. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She was not wearing a seatbelt, police said.