MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Westwood residents packed into Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church Saturday morning to speak with local leaders about problems they want addressed.
Many people had similar issues they want handled like issues with MLGW and getting trash picked up. However, neighbor Marvin Banks is dealing with a unique issue that he didn’t know was going to be a problem.
“Notorious for illegal dumping,” Banks said. “Household trash, furniture, mattresses carpets, contractor debris.”
It’s a problem Banks mentioned to city leaders at the meeting after calling "311" for months.
Councilwoman Yolanda Cooper-Sutton brought up Mayor of Memphis Paul Young’s newly created strike team going around picking up trash, but the team is new and small.
“It is one team,” Cooper-Sutton said. “One truck — three men ... that strike team gets an overload from what we see what’s happening in this city. They’re trying to get from one place to another place.”
The city’s illegal dumping is objectively too much for three people to tackle, so Banks took the initiative to clean the mess himself. Still, that initiative was met with consequences.
“I started getting citations from the city for illegal dumping — for me cleaning someone else’s illegal dumping,” Banks said.
The city told him and ABC24 that he’s cited for touching the illegal dumping and the only way out is to show up in court.
“It would move through the enforcement process and ultimately into environmental court where they’ll be given a hearing and the opportunity to tell their side of the story and ask for leniency,” the city’s Solid Waste Director, Philip Davis said.
Banks said he’s not going to do what the citations say.
He wants the city to stop adding new measures to address problems without fixing the measures that are already in place but that don’t work.
“Now we movin’ to the strike team,” Banks said. “Well, what are we doing about 311? What did we do before 311? All these things we have in place to take care of the issue — we just add new layers to it and none of it works.”
“If they contact 311 and they’re not seeing a response, they can contact 311 and ask to speak to a supervisor and they’ll escalate it,” Davis said.
Banks did get to meet in person with several officials from the City of Memphis. He told ABC24 he’s glad people can contact certain leaders and get issues handled. Still, not everyone knows who to contact to get a problem handled quickly.
He said has a few things he wants the city to do. He wants the city to hire more people, cite the people responsible for dumping and respond to all 311 requests within two weeks.
If you have trash that you want picked up, you can contact 311, 52CLEAN or download the city's 311 app to file a report.