CLEANING UP SPRINGFIELD’S GARBAGE
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be alleviated within a few days. He asks for any other questions, and a voice from the back calls out, “Alex is the man.” Marilyn Piland, the association’s executive director, echoes the praise. Since Taylor started as the area’s housing inspector, he’s enforced the new trash ordinance and cut their list of monthly complaints by two-thirds.

“The area has definitely been improved, but because Alex has the tools to enforce it,” Piland says. “Before, we knew there were people who didn’t have trash hauling. They put it out there all the time, or they put it at someone else’s house.

“He’s been really a bear about watching to make sure that nobody fly-dumps. If they do, he digs and gets something to identify them and pins it to them. It’s been wonderful.” Taylor says he’s not always so popular.

Due to the nature of their job, housing inspectors come across irate tenants and property owners constantly. They don’t usually appreciate his love letters, he explains.

Working with neighborhood associations is a different story — especially ones that are proactive in bringing their homes and throughways up to code. “When people come together and take pride in their neighborhood, and take the necessary steps to make it better, and with me being a city worker, if I can help them, aid them, or assist them, I’m there,” Taylor says. “That’s what my job is, that’s what Mayor Davlin hired me for — to make sure I take care of the health and welfare of the people.”

During the first few months of Taylor’s tenure in Enos Park, some of the alleys were still in disarray. He worked from alley to alley, street to street, and says the area shows vast improvement just a year later.

He points to the 800 block of North Sixth Street as one of the biggest turnarounds. Fly-dumpers would sneak into the alley and stuff their garbage into a tiny garage that opened on the back side. Once that was boarded up, Taylor says, the problem stopped. Another trouble spot was the alley directly behind the Qik-N-Ez convenience store at Fifth and North Grand. People would dump mounds of garbage, he says, and tossed it into nearby vacant lots. It’s now just as clean as some of the neighborhood’s most spotless streets, like Eighth and Ninth.

“I love it when I’m on one part of a block and I can look all the way down the alley and not see any solid waste,” Taylor says. “Right there indicates to me that I’m on top of it.”

Contact Amanda Robert at [email protected].