AN inter-agency task force has been created to address mounting concerns regarding the island’s garbage disposal problem, according to Saipan Mayor Juan B. Tudela.
Tudela yesterday said that despite his office’s continuous cleanup efforts he was “still seeing a lot of trash” thrown along roadsides.
“They know we are doing it everyday. The way I look at it, they just don’t appreciate (what the Saipan Mayor’s Office is doing),” Tudela said in an interview.
It appears that some residents expect his office to get rid of their trash, he said.
Tudela earlier said that the island was slowly becoming one huge garbage dump, noting the bags of trash that his office had found along roadsides, hidden behind tall grasses.
He said the littering control law should be enforced.
According to Tudela, an inter-agency body composed of representatives from various government offices have been formed and is currently ironing out plans of actions to ensure that residents properly dispose their garbage.
He said the task force recently had its first meeting with House Speaker Heinz S. Hofschneider, R-Saipan.
The task force is composed of staff from the Division of Environmental Quality, the Coastal Resources Management, the Department of Public Works, the Division of Sanitation and the Mayor’s Office, Tudela said.
Tudela, who has no enforcement powers under the anti-littering law, has asked Health Secretary James U. Hofschneider to schedule a training for the mayor’s community services staff.
Tudela wants his staff certified as “agents of change and health promoters at the village level.”
The training would enable his staff to conduct a house-to-house education campaign, the mayor said.
