Parks, Buildings and Recreation Management Director Tom Ashe and City Councilor Brian Santaniello expressed concerns about trash in the city’s parks and spoke about their efforts to combat the issue. City Councilor Lavar Click-Bruce was also in attendance at the July 29 press conference.
Reminder Publishing photo by Ryan Feyre
SPRINGFIELD — The chairs of the City Council’s Health and Human Services and Public Safety committees have joined forces to work on a home rule petition that urges the state to change its current laws around drugs near playgrounds and schools.
At Large City Councilor Brian Santaniello and Ward 5 City Councilor Lavar Click-Bruce said they are working with the city’s legal department on drafting the petition.
“There are more holes in [the current state law] than Swiss cheese,” said Santaniello. “We’re going to bring legislation before the City Council as a home rule petition.”
The petition aims to recover a law from over a decade ago that would dish out a two-year mandatory sentence to drug dealers standing within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds.
That law used to be in effect until it was amended in 2012.
Now, in order to violate the state law, drug activity must occur within 300 feet of a school zone and 100 feet within a playground, according to Springfield Lt. Jamie Bruno, and a threat of violence must emerge during the drug transaction.
“It’s very challenging to use this drug-free and school zone violation,” Bruno said of the current law. “There are no attachments as far as mandatory sentences or minimum mandatory and so it’s to the discretion of the court of how we’re going to impose a penalty for an arrest.”
One of the more troubling aspects of the commonwealth’s current law, according to Santaniello and Click-Bruce, is the fact that there are no drug-free zones between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m.
“I’m not in the business of giving drug dealers business hours; that’s point-blank simple,” Click-Bruce said at a press conference on July 29 inside Johnny Appleseed Park at 490 Hancock St. “I’m here to protect the residents of our city of Springfield and make sure our parks are safer, [and] kids [and] families can come and enjoy our parks without coming here and pricking themselves.”
The two councilors joined Parks, Buildings and Recreation Management Director Tom Ashe at Johnny Appleseed Park to tour the land and see the exorbitant amount of trash people leave overnight. During the walkthrough, Reminder Publishing observed alcohol nips, drug paraphernalia, Dunkin’ Styrofoam cups and other types of trash strewn throughout the park.
In an interview, Ashe said the city’s crews spend “all day every day” cleaning up big trash and little trash across the 52 parks across the city. Oftentimes, he said a crew will spend half the day cleaning Johnny Appleseed Park alone.
During the July 29 press conference, Reminder Publishing observed several people from Springfield Parks picking up trash using trash picker tools.
Ashe said the city’s constant effort to pick up the trash is so people can enjoy the parks as much as they can.
“We are here every single day cleaning up our parks,” Ashe said, “We are 100% firmly committed to making sure all our particular parks are clean, secure and safe for families.”
Despite what Ashe says are the city’s best efforts, he believes stricter state laws regarding drugs near playgrounds and schools would greatly decrease the amount of trash present in the city’s parks.
At a Health and Human Services committee meeting in late June, Ashe shared that the city could “fill a truck” with the number of syringes they find daily, and added that children are barely in the parks during summer vacation due to the daily trash problems.
He said his department is working with the mayor’s office and Police Department to install cameras in all the city’s parks so the city can better monitor — particularly at night — what is going on.
“It’s certainly disheartening,” Ashe said. “But we can’t control things that go on in society, we can only react to them.”
The city’s efforts to combat drugs and trash inside its parks come at a time when non-fatal and fatal overdoses are above what they were when the city started keeping data in 2018, according to Health and Human Services Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris.
She said fentanyl has been the “number one challenge” throughout the city and added that perpetrators are cutting the drug using a horse tranquilizer called xylazine.
“It’s not just the fentanyl, it’s what’s being used in order to enhance that high or cut that fentanyl,” Caulton-Harris said. “That is also a huge problem for the city of Springfield and probably across the commonwealth.”
The problems have been exacerbated by the fact that there is a shortage of detox beds on this side of the state, according to Caulton-Harris.
In an interview with Reminder Publishing, Click-Bruce and Santaniello did not indicate when a home rule petition could be ready for the full council to vote on, but they said they are doing their due diligence now.
More specifically, the duo aims to gather the public’s and neighborhood councils’ opinions on the legislation before bringing it in front of the council. At the time of the press conference, they shared that they are meeting with the law department “very shortly” to formulate the petition’s language.
The goal of this effort is to make it so families can visit the parks in a safe manner.
“I’m a father of five, a husband; I have a grandson, and I coach sports,” Click-Bruce said. “For me, why [this is] important is quite simple … we want to make sure everybody is safe, but most importantly for me, our young people.”
