Too much mess on the streets of Southbank

Why are we receiving lip service about the cleaning of our streets? It has really started to irritate me of late.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, these issues weren’t as critical, and when reported, were actioned within reasonable time.

Late last year, as I was walking around Southbank, which I do daily (according to my pedometer I average around 12km daily), I started to photograph all the full and overflowing rubbish bins.

Over the space of about six weeks I had a collection of around 80 photographs at varying locations. I collated them into their locations, recording the time the picture was taken.

It was quite revealing that certain locations were consistently overflowing, and some by about midday.

I also queried how council determines the placement of rubbish bins as it was notable some of the high foot-traffic areas were low on bins. For example, City Rd is a high-traffic street and there are only two rubbish bins near the Power St intersection (163 City Rd, and front of Foodworks), yet if you walk along Kavanagh St, there is a rubbish bin almost every 50 metres where there is significantly less foot traffic.

In any case, I noted this was not only a problem around Southbank, but at certain points within the CBD I would also frequently see the same rubbish bins overflowing, day-in day-out.

Over the past few months I have also made around 70 graffiti removal request with mixed results. Sometimes I am advised “appropriate action has been taken” only to return and see the graffiti is still present.

Other times, the requests have been referred to another authority such as Metro, VicRoads or other government institutions to learn that under their evaluation the reported graffiti may never be removed anytime soon.

And then, when some of these items have been addressed, I find that the graffiti removal team has done a slapdash job and left me cringing.

For example, merely writing over the graffiti with the appropriate background colour but now it is the same words just in a matching background colour, or they have not painted careful lines around the affected area and left it with markings outside area boundaries … just lacking attention to detail.

I think the council can, and should, do better.

I encourage you to keep reporting any issues via the council’s website, it is easy to use and you will receive a ticket number and kept abreast of the progress.

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