Years of illegally dumped trash — including more than 100 tires as well as televisions, couches and mattresses– is being removed from the bed of the San Benito River this week after the city of Hollister received permission from the California Department Fish and Wildlife to conduct the work.
Mayor Ignacio Velazquez said the city hired Ken Crowe and his crew from Big Ken’s Trucking and Services to do the work, which so far has yielded “hundreds of bags of trash,” according to Velazquez. “We’ve been trying to clean up the area for quite a while,” he said. “There was several years of trash in that pile.”
One large container has already been filled and was scheduled to be hauled away Friday, with another one being brought in to be filled and removed by Monday. The work is being done from the Fourth Street bridge south about 30 yards on the east side of the dry riverbed, which could resume flowing this winter if predictions of a strong El Nino come to pass. That was another factor for the city to get the work done now, the mayor said.
“The idea is that we need to start cleaning up our city and we wanted to get things off the river before the rains came,” Velazquez said. “We want to put a stop to that illegal dumping. I don’t think it’s acceptable to leave it there.”
People have apparently been using service roads near the river to drive down and dump trash there, Velazquez said. Those roads have now been blocked with the hope that will curtail the dumping. Velazquez said the clean-up was not related to the large homeless encampment on the river’s edge, which he said is approximately 300 yards south of the dump area.
Illegally-dumped trash has been an issue for decades in the river, which is annually cleaned up by nonprofit groups such as the Outdoor Club at San Benito High School. The amount of garbage near the Fourth Street bridge was too much for a small, volunteer crew, Velazquez said, so the city is paying between $3,000 and $4,000 to hire Crowe and his crew.
“This trash was so deep and the pile was so high, we needed professionals to get it done,” the mayor said. “At this point now, it would be great to have groups volunteer to keep the riverbed clean,” he said. “If we keep doing that, we can keep a handle on it and it won’t build up.”