County code office says worst illegal dumps have been cleaned; hopes citizenry will change littering habits

Hold your breath, knock on wood, hop on one leg, or spit over your shadow. Whatever your good luck custom happens to be, Hunter Lawrence wishes the whole county would cross their collective fingers for a few days.

“As of right now, as far as I know, we have all the illegal dumps in Panola County cleaned up right now,” Lawrence said Tuesday. “I’m sure there are some we can’t see from the roads, but for what is easy for the public to see and what looks so bad for our county, we have all those cleaned up for now.”

Lawrence, the county’s code enforcement officer, spends most days driving around Panola County with two inmates assigned to him from the county jail, collecting trailers full of debris – most of it illegally dumped under bridges, in ditches, and often on the roadway shoulders.

Lawrence submitted a list of recently cleaned properties to the Board of Supervisors earlier this month, many of which are known problems areas the county has been cleaning up for years.

“It’s the same song that Panola County has been singing for years,” said Cole Flint, president of the Board of Supervisors. “It’s just a different verse. The board members work hard to keep a watch on the roads in their district and sometimes it seems like an area will stay clean for a couple of months and then you drive by one day and there’s mattresses and tires everywhere.”

Flint said the attention from each supervisor helps Lawrence and the trustees, but the expense of cleaning illegal dumps is a burden that taxpayers shouldn’t have to bear.

“There are a lot of things we have to pay for as citizens, but the thousands of dollars we spend on cleaning up illegal dumps is totally unnecessary. That money could be spent a hundred better ways, but if we stop picking up the trash it would just pile back up,” Flint said.

Lawrence said the support of the supervisors and more attention to problem areas has helped, but ultimately the county’s residents will have to change behaviors to make a lasting difference.

“I don’t know what it is about the people here, but you can tell a difference in Panola and these other counties around us,” Lawrence said. “The people here seem to just not care what our county looks like. When we get ahead of the trash like we are now it looks pretty good riding around the county, but if we stopped just a month every one of those places would be piled up again.”

“I wish there was some way to get people to understand the damage they do to the rest of the county when they dump their trash on public property,” he said.

Fines and court appearances for offenders in the past year have been effective, Lawrence said, but others are continuing to sully the county’s appearance. “Usually when we catch somebody and make them clean it up and they have to pay court costs that stops them, but there seems to be somebody else right behind them.”

The most recent illegal dumping sites to be cleaned were found on the following roads: Compress, Old Panola, Melrose, Lucious Taylor, Vance Bottom, Old Crenshaw, Burford, Parks Place, Paul White, Whitten, Curtis, Shell, Ditch Bank, Ballentine, Morrow, Hadorn, and Pocahontas.

“You will notice most of those are in the north part of the county,” Lawrence said. “That’s where the biggest part of our problems are. We get some south of Batesville, but for the most part the worst trash is always up in the north around the Sardis and Como areas.”

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