Local volunteers cleaned Fair Park over the weekend ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
More than 1,000 came to the Fair Park area in South Dallas to pick up trash and clean the community, as reported by WFAA.
“We always know there [are] people less fortunate than us in this world,” said one volunteer. “When I was growing up, there was a lot of people that gave us a hand,” adding he was grateful to have “the chance to give back” to the community.
The cleanup event was part of the MLK Fest, according to WFAA. The event was also held in honor of desegregation advocate Juanita Craft. Live music, food, and activities for children were included as well.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, other local volunteer groups have taken to the streets to pick up litter and keep the City of Dallas clean.
This comes as the City of Dallas does a “poor” job of maintaining street cleanliness, according to a government survey.
“As we looked around this last year, it seemed clear that in the City of Dallas … there [are] parts of the city where people are coming in from out of town, and frankly, they’ve just been really dirty,” Louis Darrouzet, CEO of the Metroplex Civic & Business Association, previously told The Dallas Express.
“If the City is not taking charge of this [and] keeping our roads and streets and sidewalks clean … it’s our community, it’s our responsibility at the end of the day,” Darrouzet continued. “If you think back to the olden days when there wasn’t this huge bureaucratic government that did all these services, they had small communities and little towns, and if you wanted stuff to get done, everybody had to do it.”
The City of Dallas recently launched a dashboard that keeps track of litter and trash violations logged by Code Compliance.
Throughout 2023, the department logged tens of thousands of violations related to litter and junk.
