Lawmaker: community service needed for litter violators
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A state lawmaker wants to update the state's littering laws to allow judges to assess community service in all circumstances.
The state rewrote its littering laws in 2018 to increase fines from $50 to $300 with repeat offenders facing fines up to $1,000. The 2018 law also requires an offender to pick up litter or illegally dumped trash for five to 30 hours within six months. In addition, existing fines are doubled when committed in a litter enforcement corridor and tripled for litter that originated from a commercial business within a litter enforcement corridor.
But state Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-Royersford, wants to further change the state's littering laws. Ciresi said a study conducted from 2018 to 2019 found more than 500 million pieces of litter on roadways throughout Pennsylvania. Statewide, Pennsylvania spends $14 million a year to clean up litter, and even so you can still find it on our roads, in our neighborhoods, and along our rivers and streams.
"Unfortunately, while some littering offenses include community service as a penalty, not all of our littering statutes allow a person convicted of a littering offense to be required to clean up litter," Ciresi wrote in his co-sponsorship memorandum. "I believe that allowing for this type of a penalty would be a commonsense approach to teaching the value of using proper trash receptacles while keeping Pennsylvania beautiful."
Updating Pennsylvania's litter laws to ensure consistency in the availability of litter clean-up community service as a penalty was also a recommendation of Pennsylvania's Litter Action Plan, developed by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection .
Regulations and enforcement are a tool at preventing and deterring littering behavior. The workgroup evaluated the effectiveness of current ordinances, laws and statutes and their enforcement as it relates to reducing litter in Pennsylvania. The workgroup also identified possible statutory and enforcement updates to ensure littering regulations are enforced.
The Litter Action Plan sets a goal to reduce the amount of litter in Pennsylvania by 30% by 2026. To gauge if Pennsylvania is successful in meeting this litter reduction goal, the state will sponsor visible litter surveys at multiple locations throughout the state every year for five years. Starting with data from these select locations in 2022 as the baseline data, the commonwealth will revisit the same spots each year through 2027 to conduct visible litter surveys to see if litter is being reduced. Then, in 2027, the commonwealth will embark on a follow up assessment of the Litter Action Plan to evaluate if Pennsylvania has been or has not been successful in changing residents' behavior to prevent littering.
"Currently, some litter-related laws only state that violators may be sentenced to help pick up litter on their second or third offenses," the Litter Action Plan states. "To have violators better understand the impacts of their actions and help to clean up the litter they have contributed to our communities and roads, the appropriate litter laws should be updated to include mandatory litter pick-up as a sentence. Litter laws and community service sentences should be updated to include litter clean-ups as an option."