As many as four different city and school district departments may be responsible for a path running by a Burnaby elementary school, but that hasn’t stopped old shopping carts, rat-attracting garbage and occasional bits of drug paraphernalia from piling up along the stretch, according to a strata owner living next to it.
The asphalt path runs along the south side of Marlborough Elementary School (6060 Marlborough Ave.) between Nelson Avenue and the Marlborough School Walkway.
Warren Mirko, who lives in a strata complex right next to the walkway, first complained to the city about a year ago, he said, when unkempt blackberry bushes had started encroaching on the path.
The bushes had become a convenient place for “vagabonds and drifters” in the area to stash their belongings and garbage, Mirko said, creating a rat superhighway running along two adjacent strata complexes.
For one period during the summer, he said he caught a rat a day in backyard traps.
“After a strongly worded email, the bushes were cut about a week later, so we figured, OK, the city’s taken responsibility,” Mirko said.
The garbage, however, has continued to accumulate, he said.
“It’s an inviting area for people to come and leave more garbage,” he said.
By January, Mirko had had enough, he said, and he’s been emailing back and forth with the city ever since, trying to get the garbage taken care of.
One response, from the city’s sanitation department on March 13 said responsibility for the area by Marlborough Elementary seemed to be split between three different city departments
“Bush trimming is maintained by the Engineering Department, litter on sidewalk often falls under Sanitation and litter on public path or walkway falls under the Parks Department,” stated the email.
“However, we double-checked with our foreman and the foreman from the Parks Department, (and) neither of the two departments had any history of maintaining that strip of walkways. Therefore, we have forwarded your previous email to the School Board Maintenance Department for follow up.”
As of the NOW’s press deadline Tuesday, Mirko said he hadn’t heard back from the school district or the city, and the garbage has stayed put.
Having just paid more than $600 on his sanitation and sewage tax bill, Mirko said the lack of action didn’t sit well with him.
“Them passing it around between the parks board, the sanitation and engineering departments and the school board doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said. “It’s crazy with all the different departments and a $1 billion surplus for the city … that they can’t figure out how to send someone here to pick up the garbage,” he said.
But the garbage should be picked up sometime this week, according to the city’s superintendent of solid waste and recycling, Mike Demeda.
He said Mirko’s service request didn’t land on his desk until Monday despite Mirko having received his first email response back from the sanitation department on Feb. 1.
The request was likely first bounced to the parks department, according to Demeda, but that department runs bares bones until hiring its seasonal staff at the beginning of April, he said.
“It could have fallen through the cracks, or parks was going to wait until they got their staff here in two weeks, but we’re going to take care of it right now,” Demeda said.
He said the path, since it isn’t a street or sidewalk, is actually the parks department’s responsibility to maintain, with the school board taking care of garbage up to the end of the school’s property line.
Demeda sympathized with Mirko’s concern the unkempt path would attract more garbage, especially from “vagabonds and drifters.”
Demeda said the sanitation department visits the Metrotown library twice a week to clean up debris left by people sleeping near the building.
“We have a lot of homeless in Burnaby now,” Demeda said. “We have them just further along down Kingsway; they’re on private property that doesn’t even belong to the city; there’s a group of homeless living there. Wherever there’s pretty well a vacant lot.”
As for the path by Marlborough Elementary, that’ll be the parks department’s responsibility after this week’s cleanup, according to Demeda.
“This will be something that’ll have to be on Parks’ radar,” he said.
