City cleaning up trashy image
Gallup's ban on 40-ounce beer bottles is making an impact, officials contend

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The Gallup trash wars may be almost over.

City officials say recent efforts to promote city-wide clean-ups have resulted in something that no one ever believed they would see in Gallup a cleaner city.

Karl Lohmann, who has been a big part of the city clean-up efforts for more than a decade, said Thursday that more trash has been picked up in Gallup in the last two years than had been picked up in the nine years before Bob Rosebrough became mayor.

He estimated that various groups picked up 70 tons of trash between 1994 and 2003. But once Rosebrough became mayor, he made trash a major issue and in his first 100 days in office, neighborhood cleanup campaigns and city-sponsored cleanups netted at least 40 tons of trash being picked up.

Since then, Lohmann estimated that because of the city's decision to put a bounty on glass, another 40 tons of trash have been picked up.

These efforts and the ban on 40-ounce beer bottles has resulted, he said, in a cleaner Gallup than at anytime in the past two or three decades.

City Manager Eric Honeyfield said that while the 40-ounce beer bottles are apparently a thing of the past, some of the city's efforts to recycle the glass have not gone as well.

Honeyfield said that the efforts to get liquor dealers to set aside the bottles they gather for recycling has been a "dismal failure" because the dealers include other things besides bottles so it makes it very costly to separate. The city has worked out a deal to have a local company pulverize the bottles so it can be used for other purposes.

Lohmann said that his groups used to have to visit hard-core drinking sites as many as six times a year to clean them up but because of the elimination of the 40-ounce bottles from the sites, it's now a lot easier to clean them up.

"We are past the stage of spending all of our time picking up bottles," he said. "We are now to the raking-and-sifting stage."

What this means, he said, is that his groups now have a chance to really "attack the illegal dump situation" in this town and he's now in the process of setting up a volunteer organization to do just that.

He wants to call it CUPID but he says that he's not sure just yet what that will stand for.

"It could mean Citizens United to Prevent Illegal Dumping," he said. "Or it could be Cowboys United to Prevent Illegal Dumping or it could be Christians United to Prevent Illegal Dumping."

Or it could be all three.

Whatever it is, Lohmann said that Gallup residents won't give up until the Gallup trash war has been completely won.