For Alex Rodriguez, the rats and stench are the worst things about the rubbish routinely dumped on the street and alley in his South Los Angeles neighborhood.
The refuse, he and his neighbors said, has included dead roosters, old tires, household garbage and plastic containers with used motor oil. Someone even left the battered hull of a fiberglass boat by Rodriguez's house near Wadsworth Avenue and East 107th Street.
The rubbish sat for four weeks, becoming a magnet for more illegal dumping. By the time city crews cleaned up the mess, trash surrounded the boat and five sofas blocked the sidewalk.
"I don't even want to have my kids out here because of the smell," Rodriguez said on a recent afternoon. "They throw trash here like it's the dumpster."
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has made public safety a top priority of his administration, pushing to expand the Police Department so the city can continue cracking down on crime and gangs. But spending more money there meant less was available to public works officials responsible for policing the city's alleyways. Those officials now blame budget cuts, in part, for the fact that trash is freely dumped in some of the city's most impoverished neighborhoods, eroding the quality of life in ways that can breed more serious problems.
For two months, The Times surveyed alleys and streets in Watts and nearby neighborhoods, chronicling the scenes in photographs and videos. In some alleys, rubbish sat for six weeks. The findings were corroborated by city records.
About half the rubbish dumped illegally citywide is in South Los Angeles, but residents in other parts of town said they also sometimes wait two to three weeks for alleys to be cleaned.
"Eventually stuff gets picked up, but I've had to call two or three times," said Jennifer Moran, a member of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council.
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800 miles of alleys
Officials with the Department of Public Works, the agency responsible for maintaining the 800 miles of city alleys, said they were doing all they could to fight illegal dumping and keep alleys clean.
But records show that the number of arrests by department investigators for illegal dumping dropped from 359 in 2002 to 55 last year. The number so far this year: three.
