Elizabeth Orosco
Northeast News

Eleven Kansas City neighborhoods, with the help of Aim4Peace, joined together on a cold and drizzly Saturday morning to tackle the issue of trash littering their communities.

Residents from Blue Valley, McCoy, Independence Plaza, East 23rd St. PAC, Washington Wheatley, Santa Fe, South Round Top, Heart of the City, Oak Park, Seven Oaks, and Vineyard collected bulky items, tires, and brush from their neighborhoods.

Large trash trucks were lined up at East High School, and ten other locations, as trailers overloaded with debris waited their turn to unload the garbage from the streets.

Loads of tires were hauled off as volunteers chucked them into a trailer.

Crews tossed mattresses, dressers, trash bags, broken toilets, piles of wood, and old toys into the trash trucks.
Dale Fugate, President of McCoy Neighborhood Association, said blight is directly connected to crime.

“Blight in the neighborhood is like a stop,” he said. “If your neighborhood is mostly rentals like this, you could choose to live here or not. When you get a good person that moves out, if you’ve got blight, it’s hard to get a good person to move back in. If you can get everything cleaned up and get rid of the blight, then maybe you can build the neighborhood back up.”