Trash, alcohol and a beach party

Gina Lubrano. The San Diego Union – Tribune. San Diego, Calif.: Jul 12, 2004. pg. B.7

It was such a San Diego story. The article Tuesday said that it took six hours to clean up after the birthday that spawned a huge beach bash. It was attended by more than 500,000 people, some of whom left something behind for others to clean up.

A story about the 100 tons of trash — mostly beer bottles, beer cans and cardboard beer boxes — picked up by about 30 city workers and more than 100 volunteers along 18 miles of beach and bayfront picnic spots the day after Independence Day appeared on the front page of the local section. Reaction was varied and for the most part seemed to hinge on whether people support or oppose banning alcohol at the beaches.

The story was headlined: “Post-holiday beach blues” and included the dominant photo on the page taken July 5th that showed a young couple trying to keep warm amid “the Fourth of July trash on Pacific Beach.” A second photo with the continuation of the story inside the local section showed the littered north shore of Sail Bay near Fanuel Street Park. A smaller photo showed city workers and volunteers cleaning up trash left on the beach south of Crystal Pier. The photos documented the mess.

But to some who oppose any kind of ban on alcohol at the beach, the story was perceived as editorializing; they said it did not belong on the news pages. The San Diego Union-Tribune has editorialized in favor of numerous limited measures to ban alcohol at local beaches, although it has not taken a stand on a total ban. This, however, was a news story based on fact; the point was not to promote one position over another, and it did not do that. However, the story said that “for many locals, the trash reaffirmed their opposition to alcohol on the beach.” It also noted that the “crowds were generally well behaved on Sunday, considering the number of people at the beaches.” Most of the 305 citations issued by police were related to alcohol, the story said.

Some readers were bothered by the trash and did not even mention the alcohol. “Maybe we should remember the sage advice of Robert Fulghum,” wrote Art Cooley of La Jolla.

“In ‘Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,’ he, among other things, says, ‘Clean up our own mess.’ Why not ask everyone to take home whatever he or she brings to the beach? Put up signs to this effect and ask the volunteers to go among the beachgoers asking them to take all their stuff away when they leave,” Cooley wrote.

“To emphasize the point, remove all the trash bins. To remove the largest component of the trash, which seems to be bottles and cans, adopt a law that requires a dime deposit for each container. Paid when the container is purchased, the deposit can be redeemed when the empty container is returned. In at least nine states and numerous foreign countries, these laws work very effectively to remove trash and recycle resources. If (the) exhortation by Fulghum won’t work, try economic incentives: we are all capitalists after all.”

Scott Crosby, director of Web operations for freepb.org, wrote that he was “dismayed to read yet another hysterical article … presenting only the ‘ban everything fun’ camp’s point of view. …

“While it’s true that there’s inevitably a lot of trash generated with that many people in town, you completely failed to mention any of the positives, let alone contact the other side for their input,” Crosby wrote in an e-mail to the reporter.

He said there was “far less trash on the beach than last year,” crediting the work of the Mission Bay Park Committee, I Love a Clean San Diego and freepb.org. The groups provided more trash containers, he wrote. He said the restroom problems were reduced thanks to the efforts of the Mission Bay Park Committee. He also cited the “general peacefulness — there were no fights anywhere near us on Sail Bay, only thousands of tax-paying citizens having a great time celebrating our nation’s birthday.”

David Brumley wrote that it’s “horrible when people trash the beach. It’s disrespectful of the environment and of the people who live there. It happens every Fourth of July and, to a lesser extent on other holidays.

But Brumley believes that public officials, including police, who enforce the rules have “political missions.”

“As long as we let politically correct crusades like the anti- alcohol movement dominate the scene, we’ll never get the real wrongs righted. It’s time to stop playing their games and go after the real offenders,” Brumley wrote.

Gina Lubrano’s column commenting on the media appears Mondays. It is the policy of The San Diego Union-Tribune to correct all errors. To discuss accuracy or fairness in the news, please write to Gina Lubrano, readers representative, Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191, or telephone (619) 293-1525. Send e-mail to: readers.rep@uniontrib.com.

Credit: READERS REPRESENTATIVE