SAN ANGELO, TX -
The tall grass and weeds were finally able to be mowed this week, but that revealed a whole news issue for our community to tackle: the litter along Loop 306.
Tim Davenport-Herbst is pastor of St. Paul Presbyterian Church. They're a part of the "Adopt-A-Highway" program, and regularly volunteer to pick up trash along a two mile stretch of road. They don't just see it as an issue of cleanliness; they see it as a moral duty.
"Everything we have is on loan from God. And so what we do with everything that we have is a reflection of our faith in God--and when we throw trash on the ground, when we use resources we should be using, when we junk things up--it's not respecting God and it's not respecting our neighbors," Tim said.
Littering in Texas is against the law. A first offense can get you $500 fine, a second offense can even carry jail time. But TxDOT says it's almost impossible to enforce, and that's why we see so much trash along the highway.
TxDOT does have a mobile app to encourage citizens to report litterers as part of their "Don't Mess with Texas" campaign. The app lets you send in the license plate number and location of a littering car. But, TxDOT says they receive very few reports, and they're almost impossible to verify.
TxDOT does work with contractors to periodically clean the trash, but the buck stops ultimately with the citizens.
"To be able to put your trash in the right place is a way of saying I respect my fellow citizens, because we're all in it together. And when we don't do that--when we chuck the trash out the window, we're saying we don't really care about the other people around us. We just care about our immediate needs.
"I think it's not a malicious thing, it's just a thoughtless thing. And all it takes is having a little bit of intentionality about what you do. [It] just means taking your trash to your trash can, putting it in the trash can, caring enough to not dump it on the ground. And all of that comes back to respecting God and God's creation," Tim said.
-Rob Harris, FOX News First
