Listen to our interview with Shane Renberg
By Michael V. Hannigan
Shane Renberg is getting tired of finding trash.
Renberg is the Henderson County Fire Marshal and his office fields between three and 10 calls every week for illegal dumping.
“We really want to put a stop to this in the county,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve lived in this county for a long time and I get tired of driving down the road and seeing this trash dumped everywhere that just spreads all over the county.”
According to state law, a person commits illegal dumping if:
- They dispose of their trash in a place not approved for solid waste.
- They allow someone else to dispose of their trash in a place not approved for solid waste.
- They receive litter or trash for disposal in a place not approved for solid waste, even if they own the dump site property themselves.
It doesn’t take much to wind up guilty of illegal dumping.
“In the State of Texas you’re responsible for your trash, so if your trash — your household garbage — ends up two or three neighbor’s yards down, basically you’ve committed illegal dumping,” Renberg said.
The penalties can be stiff. An illegal dumping conviction for as little as 5 pounds of trash can result in jail time.
While a trash bag blowing off the back of a truck can be counted as illegal dumping, that’s not the real problem, according to Renberg.
“Most of the time our illegal dumping problems aren’t one bag of trash, they’re not even two bags of trash,” he said. “We’re talking about several bags of trash, tires, and for some reason here lately we’ve had a lot of old burn barrels dumped on the side of the road.”
It is also costly.
“It is such a big problem that the county has actually spent a lot of money purchasing cameras and signs and things like that to catch illegal dumpers,” Renberg said.
Renberg said the county has seen convictions for felony illegal dumps because of the cameras.
“People think they get away with it all of the time, but between the cameras that we put in place and the citizens out there who care about the county, who want to keep the county clean who are constantly keep an eye out for us, we typically catch the people who do it,” he said.
But rather than catch dumpers, Renberg just wishes it would stop. They want to start using more dumpster rentals in town in order to make people understand that garbage should go in dumpsters, they are also trying to incorporate more recycling programs.
“It is just a really, really big risk for somebody to take to save $20 a month on trash service,” he said.
