Regina begins spring cleanup

From cups to car parts, the spring melt has revealed all kinds of trash littering Regina’s roadways.

Seventy-five city workers are rolling out this week to tackle the most cluttered areas.

“We spend about $300,000 on litter control every year, and that seems to be increasing,” Regina’s director of parks and open spaces Ray Morgan said. “It’s 100 per cent preventable.

The city says littering is a tough bylaw to enforce.

Fines can reach as high as $2,000 for an individual, or $5,000 for a corporation. Despite the tough penalty, not a single littering fine was issued last year.

That’s not the only hit wallets can take- it will also run you $120 for parking in a marked street cleaning zone. It will take an estimated seven weeks for street sweepers to canvas the city.

“We don’t go back and redo areas once we’ve gone through them,” director of roadways and transportation Norman Kyle said. “It really helps clean up the neighborhood and it’s good for the environment when people move their cars. All that dirt and gravel, we’d like to pick it up before it gets into the city’s storm system and into lakes and rivers.”

Morgan said the city is not looking into adding more garbage cans or signage, instead calling on people to take responsibility for their waste.

“We’d love to spend more resources maintain parks than picking up litter on Ring Road.”