South Sound News

Teacher says he complained for a year before city cleaned up illegal dump near Mount Tahoma

TACOMA, Wash. — Eric Knight said he complained to the city of Tacoma for a year about the heaps of miscellaneous junk that were growing right next to Mount Tahoma High School, where he teaches plant biology.

From the school's greenhouses, Knight could see it just over the fence: construction materials, old furniture, household garbage and what looked like the leftovers from evictions. All of it was dumped onto a vacant, rocky lot bordered by brambles and soaked by rain in the winter. Eventually, the refuse piled up in the city's right of way between the lot and Mount Tahoma and butted up against the school's fence.

At one point last summer, Knight said people were living in their cars on the vacant lot. He saw them coming and going when he oversaw Summer Jobs 253 at Mount Tahoma.

"It's really unsightly. This is pretty ugly-looking. There is probably a good possibly of rodents, there might be hazardous trash here, who knows, maybe drug paraphernalia," Knight said last month. "It's not right to have it next to a school."

On April 27, the right of way was finally cleaned. All that remained Wednesday was scrubby bushes and a few stray pieces of garbage on the school's side of the fence.

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Knight said he's happy to have the problem solved but frustrated it took so long for the city to do something. He'd used various channels to complain since May 2017, he said. He first called the city in May and June of last year about the problem, he said, and then he made complaints through the TacomaFirst 311 website starting in July.

"Certainly the city knew about this for months prior to doing anything," he said.

City spokeswoman Megan Snow told The News Tribune this week the city didn't learn of the problem until last month, although she acknowledged illegal dumping has been a recurring issue there.

Such illegal dumping is a regular occurrence in the city. Snow said Environmental Services Solid Waste Management is assigned to remove blight two to three times per week, and route supervisors investigate blight daily.

The city says it doesn't know who did the dumping near Mount Tahoma, so it has no one to fine. Snow said staff who did the cleanup found no hazardous materials at the site. To keep illegal dumping from happening there again, the city is considering installing fencing and boulders to keep people out, she said.

The adjacent property owner, Gary Tatum, bought that vacant parcel next to the city's right of way several years ago, hoping to build a storage facility on what he thought was commercial land. It was his first venture in buying vacant land, and he said it'll be his last.

After the purchase, he found out the property was zoned for single-family housing. That zoning doesn't make sense, Tatum said. There's a car-rental place nearby, and there used to be a loud, bustling furniture plant on that street. The plant burned down in 2012.

"That is not conducive to putting in single family homes ...," Tatum said. "They could go in there and build another furniture factory there. We were trying to do something along the lines of keeping it commercial-industrial."

Tatum said he's asked the city about having the property rezoned but said even submitting an application for a rezone was prohibitively expensive.

So the property has sat vacant.

The trouble with dumping started not long after the furniture plant burned and its employees stopped coming and going.

"That property is being used by the homeless and has had cars dumped on it. It's been a nuisance," Tatum said, adding that he's paid to have the property cleaned up twice, including paying $200 to have abandoned cars towed away. "It's kind of a no-man's land. I started out with high hopes years ago, and it just kind of petered out, and it's kind of sitting there doing nothing."