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Videos Sell Creek Clean Up

"This is what people think of our neighborhood," a child says distastefully as the camera pans across a trash-strewn creek bed. "They come in here and dump their garbage."

The youngster is one of many Oakland residents featured in two videos released as part of Alameda County's new "Clean Creeks" campaign. Officials are making neighborhood pride a major theme of the $200,000 campaign, which aims to stop people from dumping trash into urban streams and encourages them to report others who unload anything from bags of lawn clippings to old car engines into the water.

It's no small problem - the county's Patty Spangler says it costs $500,000 a year to remove an estimated 1000 tons of debris from the water. The county hired Mason Tillman Associates to conduct the campaign. In addition to producing the videos, MTA is placing signs in local busses, contacting neighborhood and church groups and asking private companies to include campaign material with their bills.

The campaign will run through July. It covers Oakland and Berkeley, and, if successful, could be extended to the rest of the county. Spangler says the campaign isn't part of the county's compliance with the Clean Water Act. But it is in keeping with the S.F. Regional Board's goal of promoting proactive watershed cleanup efforts, says the Board's Tom Mumley.

MTA president Eleanor Ramsey says the firm decided on the "clean neighborhood" approach for several reasons. Although trash dumping does cause some pollution problems and can potentially block water flow, it would take an extensive and expensive outreach effort to get that message across. "It doesn't take that same level of public education to get people to think they don't want trash floating in their creeks," she says.

Contact: Patty Spangler (510) 670-5563

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