Picking up Douglas

An estimated 25 local residents spent five hours of their time this past Saturday walking around town picking up garbage and debris all with the intent of helping clean up the city.

The volunteers walked through alley’s; cleaned vacant lots and even removed weeds, excess grass and shrubs from in front of stores.

Douglas’ City Manager Carlos De La Torre said this was just the first in a series of steps by the Mayor and City Council to help clean up the city.

Several different civic organizations took part in the event and while De La Torre is grateful to those who did step up and helped out, he admits he would have liked to see a little more participation from the citizens of Douglas.

“I think we need help from (the media) and the community to see how we can entice that,” he said. “We do our out reach to the various organizations … we need more of an engagement from the community as well.”

De La Torre himself had been out of town on city business and returned home late Friday night only to show up at 7 a.m. Saturday and do what he could to help clean up the city.

Maybe it had something to do with the timing, De La Torre said, adding that since this is a community wide effort maybe the citizens need to let him know when would be a good time to get together and do this as a community wide effort.

The weather conditions were ideal Saturday and De La Torre said another possible clean up effort is planned for sometime in the spring.

“I believe that we need to invest in our community before we basically can ask somebody else to come invest in our community,” he said. “We need to show that to the outside world.”