Residents demand action from city officials to clean up Tulsa.
News Channel 8 sat down with residents who worry the trash accumulating around the city will hurt our economy and quality of life.
They say it’s a rarity to come across a clean street in Tulsa.
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“There were syringes with serum in the ends and one of the needles was like kept sitting on the sidewalk,” Kathy Sebert, a concerned Tulsan, said. “Parking lots across town, If you go to Target or Lowe's or somewhere. You open the car door and you step out and you just stepped into a dirty diaper.”
She says trash in the city has become so overwhelming they’ve been forced to act themselves.
“We actually have 70-year-old volunteers that are going around picking this stuff up,” Sebert said. “But it's hard to make yourself pick up something after we've just gone through this pandemic.”
Now, residents are demanding action from the city.
“Our citizens are saying I'm paying my taxes,” Sebert said. “Why isn’t my trash being picked up?”
She says the trash is not only hurting residents but the economy.
“We’re bringing people into Tulsa and they're passing blowing trash, smelling garbage, overflowing dumpsters, things like that,” Sebert said. “They're not going to want to come back.”
City Councilor Grant Miller says several Tulsans have contacted him about trash concerns.
“A lot of times homelessness can create a lot of this trash,” Miller said. “There's people digging through the dumpsters work things out that they want and then leaving the trash strewn about.”
He says it will take all the stakeholders: city crews, residents, business owners, and leadership to make the change.
Miller will hold a town hall meeting at Hicks Park Community Center at 6:30 Tuesday night to address this problem along with other citizen concerns.
“We're reviewing the improve our Tulsa package,” Miller said. “And so maybe it's something we should consider, you know, point a small amount of resources from all of the other projects that we're going to have and really ramping up the trash cleanup in the Street Sweepers and stuff like that.”