June 27, 2020
BRCS Lower Commons In Traverse City Cleanup Report

This year due to the COVID-19 Epidemic, we have not been doing river cleanups but
I thought doing this one would be safer since it was one without shuttles.

First, it was to be a UofM Alumni outing but that was canceled, so we tried for a general public
cleanup using a Facebook post but that attained the enthusiasm of professional snail racing. So,
I finally fell on the idea of the tried and true plan of paying the homeless people who live there and
whose trash we will be picking up, to do the work.

Having some grant money in hand from the Community Quest Organization and the Bethlehem
Lutheran Church Mission Endowment Fund but not for this specific project and having just
completed a fairly successful fund raising raffle, we decided to go ahead and pay 4.00 for a
FULL 55 gallon bag of trash. That idea was received with great enthusiasm by the
homeless residents of the Commons and they could not wait to get started.

Karl, my trusty helper, passed out bags on Thursday for the Saturday event and when
I arrived this morning they were waiting bags in hand. At 9:00 am, there were 5 homeless
guys, 9 community members from the USCG, Trout Unlimited, TACP, BRCS and a guest.

As always, Karl was there to help but he seemed drunk. I asked if he had been drinking
but he said he was drinking yesterday because it was his birthday. I asked him to do some
simple tasks before we got started and he couldn't figure them out. I took them away from him
and handed them to another volunteer and he got angry and left.

Now, Karl is the one who has been homeless himself and he knows all these people and he
knows the Commons and he was to be our guide in the maze of woods but now he is gone.

My first thought was to just cancel and send everyone home but I knew that was not going
to happen because the City had sent a garbage truck for us to use and that guy was working
on a Saturday (his day off) for our project. Canceling would cause us to NEVER get another
helping hand from the City ever again.

So after we took some photos, I led the people to the first location and got them started working.
Then I took the BRCS trailer to get the golf cart from the TC Golf Club that we use to bring the
heavy bags out of the woods.

My job for the whole day was to drive the cart back and forth filled with bags. I was surprised how
tired I was when I got home. I can't imagine how tired the volunteers and homeless guys were
because they removed 4500 pounds of trash from those woods in about 1 1/2 hours. We left
about that same amount behind for the next time if there is one.

If we had had 40 people in early May, we could have completed the entire job but with only 20
and in late June, there were too few people, it was too hot and the woods were too "leafed out"
to get the job completed. We did what we could do and then we had to stop. I got no
complaints about "calling it a day."

We spent $204.00 for 4500 pounds of trash.

I think that's a bargain.

Our THANKS go out to all the community folks who worked on their day off,
to the homeless guys who worked really hard and were really very helpful to
all of us strangers in their neighborhood and to the TC Golf and Country Club
for the neat little golf utility cart that works so very well for getting that nasty
crap out of the woods.

All the photos are here:

All the photos from recon (BEFORE)

All the photos from cleanup project (AFTER)

Some of the photos will have GPS coordinates as a link under them.

Click that link and you can see where that photo was taken.