SUMTER, S.C. — Sumter County is “talking trash” as nearly 50 county employees started their morning out on the side of the road picking up trash. The county has been divided into four quadrants and is focusing on cleaning up litter in each section. This morning, employees got together to clean up part of quadrant three, which is between 15 South and 378 East, with help from a new teammate.
“He's a motivator for cleanup efforts,” Public Works Director Karen Hyatt explains about Sumter County’s new litter mascot. “This is our General KICS and if he'll turn around, it stands for ‘Keep It Clean Sumter.’ And we had a contest and it was named by local residents.”
I’ts part of the county’s continued effort to address littering.
‘Oh yeah. It's definitely been a problem,” Sumter resident Ethan Simon says about litter in the county.
Simon has lived in Sumter for the past 12 years, where he works as a heavy equipment operator. He showed up with other county employees to pick up trash along the road on Thursday morning.
“Well if we want other people to do it, we’ve got to do it ourselves. So I mean it just helps make other people want to do it more. And it definitely gets the county clean,” Simon shares.
“We're asking citizens to clean up, businesses, and if we're going to ask somebody else to do it, we need to do it. So we have all different departments out here: finance, HR, recreation, assessor's office, public works, stormwater,” Hyatt adds. “The litter on the road is awful. It's just disgusting. And litter affects a lot of things: the environment, clogs our ditches so when it rains with that. It affects businesses and companies looking at us to come relocate here. And other people coming in, we have a military base and people from all across the world come to Sumter. And we want it clean. And our focus is to get Sumter cleaned up not just from litter pickups but from education and enforcement.”
Hyatt says General KICS is an effort to educate kids in the community about litter prevention. As for the enforcement side, Mike McCoy works as a litter control officer, tracking down litter law violators.
“Right now we’ve got pretty close to 100% conviction rate in our courts. We’ve got our judicial side, our courts and our magistrates on our side. They understand what we’re trying to do. We’ve got the public that’s backing us and we’ve got a real good success with that,” McCoy explains. “You know, the minimum [fine] is $377.50 and it can go up to $1,000. You can also even be put in jail. We have signed some warrants on some people and there's also some bench warrants floating around now on some subjects that didn't do what the judge told them to do. So consequence of that, they were in contempt of court.”
Before beginning as a litter control officer, McCoy says he spent 21 years working for the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office.
“And during that timeframe, I didn't really have involvement with litter like I do now. And coming over here, my eyes are really been open with what we’ve got going on with litter,” McCoy details. “And it's a different type of enforcement. But it's definitely needed.”
While McCoy now works in a different type of enforcement to punish litter violators, he says starting early with education efforts like General KICS visiting schools is important “because our youngsters are keys,” McCoy says.
“That is our future. So teaching them young and teaching them the qualities and importance of what litter is all about is definitely just laying that foundation for a positive future when it comes to litter,” McCoy continues. “When they see a mascot like this, you know they definitely kind of are attracted to him like a magnet. So that's just another opportunity for a door to open to teach these youngsters why it's so important about litter.”
According to the county, the employees picked up 49 bags of litter in a mile stretch of quadrant three on Thursday morning. In all, Hyatt says they picked up 1,248 pounds of trash.
You can click here to report a litter hotspot in Sumter. To learn about the city's Litter Advisory Board, click here.