Huntingburg wants to crack down on illegal dumping

Street Superintendent Jason Stamm showed the Huntingburg Board of Public Works two images of a large pile of construction material illegally dumped at the street department’s trash collection site on First Street.

“We are continually fighting this,” Stamm said.

This incident is one of several that have occurred in the lightly regulated trash collection site. In this case however, Stamm postulated it might have taken more than one truckload to accumulate the amount of material. “We loaded this stuff up yesterday and it took one of our dumpsters,” he told the board. “It filled up an entire dumpster.”

Stamm has been researching options to decrease the amount of illegal dumping occurring at the site.

He suggested to the board that they close it down outside of the street department’s working hours. He added that on Saturday’s the gate could be opened by the on-call street department employee and then closed down at the end of the day.

He also researched an automated gate that could be opened through an app on Stamm’s phone but the cost was prohibitive.

According to the Mayor Denny Spinner, the city is set to begin researching upgrades to its security camera system this year and the trash site could be added to the list of upgrades. “We are evaluating the city-wide system,” he said.

Currently, a camera does monitor a portion of the site but according to Stamm, does not catch enough detail to identify the individuals dumping the material.

With the upgraded system, the city could identify the perpetrators of the illegal dumping and then seek damages to cover the cost to remedy the illegal dumping.