Clean up the town streets

Feb 6 2009

I WAS brought up in Ayr and attended Ayr Grammar and Belmont Academy. I moved to New Zealand 20 years ago, but come back every three years or so to visit family still in Ayr.

Each time I come back there have been changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. However, I have just finished my most recent trip home to Ayr and the changes I can see are so bad I am compelled to write to you to give the town council and some of the people of Ayr a bit of a tune up.

I stress ‘some’ because, as usual, it’s only a few that are ruining things for the rest.

My annoyance starts and ends in the lack of pride on the high street and the filthy condition of the town centre’s streets, in general. I travel the world and rarely in the so-called western civilised world are the places I visit are free people so pride-less as they surely must be to let the town centre look like it does in Ayr.

The condition of the High Street and the behaviour of some of the shoppers there is appalling.

Firstly, the pavement was covered in dog crap, people happily walking their dogs in town and letting them crap on the pavement for other people to unwittingly step in and trail all over the place.

Pride-less, dirty, lazy scoundrels, the whole lot of you that let your dog do its business on a public footpath in the first place, let alone in the town centre, and then don’t clean it up! Clean your dog crap up! Better yet, the town council should ban dogs from the town centre and shopping areas and then spend some money to enforce this by-law.

Anyone caught should not only be fined but compelled to work on cleaning the streets.

The next issue I have is that the pavement, when it’s not covered in dog droppings, is a mosaic of chewing gum carelessly discarded and stamped into the pavement. There are by-laws in thousands of other cities and towns in the rest of the world that issue heavy fines for this sort of littering. Yet in Ayr it’s a question of trying to actually see a bit of pavement from under the thousands of gum bits stuck to it.

Again the town council should start issuing fines to people for littering.

By not stopping this you are tacitly agreeing that it’s okay! In the first instance, use some of the ratepayers money and actually clean the pavements properly, with steam and solvent, get rid of what’s there, so the place looks like it has some shred of pride in its history and environment.

Lastly, the amount of cigarette butts that are stubbed out onto the waste bins simply blow off in the wind and create even more litter. Clean the streets up, town council, that’s what the ratepayers are paying for! Employ someone competent to clean up and make sure they do a good job, better yet compel those that litter, or allow their dogs’ droppings to be smeared over the pavement to clean the place up.

And don’t say it’s a contractor’s fault that you are reviewing their contract over. That’s a total buck passing cop-out, employ your own people and manage them!

You’re not building moon rockets, you are trying to keep the historic town of Ayr clean.

James Lindsay

Ayr- boy!