Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
On Thursday evening, Oct. 1, Commission Chairman J. T. Surles praised Sheriff Mac McNeill for stepping up and lending a helping hand to the Solid Waste Department, which has been without prison inmate crews for several months now because of the pandemic.
Which explains why the department has ceased the recycling program for the time being, as it depends on prison inmate crews to sort out the recyclables, and the inmates have been quarantined for months because of COVID-19.
In the interim, the Sheriff has been providing the Solid Waste Department with trustees to help clean around the main office and the collection sites.
Solid Waste Department Director Beth Letchworth said the Sheriff’s Office has been providing three trustees for four days a week since Sept. 8.
“This week we went up to five days – Monday through Friday,” Letchworth said on Thursday, Oct 8.
The trustees, Letchworth said, were helping maintain the collection sites by mowing, weeding and picking up trash.
“The sites are cleaner now,” she said, referring to a photo earlier in the Monticello News that showed the recyclable containers filled to capacity and overflowing in some instances.
How the trustees’ help came about, Letchworth said, was that Surles suggested the idea to McNeill and the latter embraced it.
“He saw the need and helped us,” Letchworth said. “He thought it was a wonderful idea.”
She said that Sam Flowers, who supervises the inmate crews, much prefers the jail crews to the prison ones.
“They work better,” Letchworth said of the jail crew. “There is no problem with contraband.”
The issue of contraband, she said, was a constant one with the prison inmates.
“It was always a battle,” Letchworth said. “People would drop off contraband for them to find.”
The jail inmates, however, not only work better, but they also had a better attitude, she said.
“They appreciate being out and doing work instead of sitting at the jail,” she said.
The inmates’ work is evident. Visit the collections sites, and they appear cleaner and more orderly than they did weeks earlier.
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