This annual effort is a tremendous community volunteer event and the organization behind it is to be heartily commended for its work.
However, in the larger picture, their original organizational mission was to act as a fund development organization to build a financial capability for additional land acquisitions to expand the Parkway, a much more important function in the long-term as our population and the encroachment pressures on the Parkway increases continually, and the Parkway falls farther behind in basic maintenance with virtually no capability to purchase additional land when it becomes available.
Clean up, while vitally needed, is generally better performed by salaried staff (helped by volunteers as needed) on an everyday basis, rather than annually; resulting in a Parkway clean all the time, instead of just once a year.
Volunteers wade into summer litter on river parkway
By Todd Milbourn - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 16, 2007
It's easy to visualize a careless smoker flicking his cigarette butt into the river or an absent-minded sunbather dropping her bottle cap on the shore.
But what's a child's car seat doing under a bush on the banks of the American River? Or a suitcase stuffed with women's undergarments and Sudafed packets?
And who would have any need for a Datsun hubcap down here?
It's not up to the more than 1,100 volunteers who descended on the American River Parkway on Saturday to solve such mysteries.
They just have to clean up the junk.
Saturday was the 29th annual Great American River Clean-Up, and a small army of environmentally minded volunteers fanned out along a 23-mile stretch of the parkway, picking up the random detritus of summer.
