Beautify Jax: Jacksonville Public Works gives trashed Springfield neighborhood a facelift

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A trashed neighborhood in Springfield is looking good after Action News Jax’s Dawn Lopez helped a viewer get answers about trash dumping.

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Kiara Watson showed Lopez how her children and other neighborhood kids have to hopscotch their way through broken glass, dirty diapers and clogged sewer drains on the way to school.

The neighbors in the area also complain about outsiders ignoring no trespassing and no dumping signs.

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Action News Jax took our drone up over the weeds and couldn’t believe what we found.

“That’s never been cut, and I’ve been here 3 years,” Watson told Lopez. “We don’t know if there’s a body back there.”

Action News Jax first went out there in February, but things are looking much different now on Walnut Street and Carmen Street.

“Thanks to your reporting, we saw an area that needed to have a face-lift,” Al Ferraro said.

Read: Beautify Jax: Historic Springfield home to illegal dumping site

You might know Al Ferraro as a 2-term City Councilmember and long-time business owner in Jacksonville. He is now the manager of blight initiatives in the city’s public works department. He met with Lopez to explain the work the department has done so far in the area.

“Our maintenance department is doing good cleaning up and picking up everything possible to reduce weeds on sidewalks. They’ll come back and edge up,” explained Ferraro.

That means no more dirty diapers and shattered glass, and the city grass is cut low.

Read: Beautify Jax: Who cleans our interstates? How we can keep Florida’s roads clean

But, not everything falls on the city’s shoulders.

“There’s a lot of pallets you showed with your drone video that showed garbage,” Ferraro said. “Unfortunately, a lot of these properties aren’t a part of the city. They belong to the railroad or privately owned.”

Ferraro said we all have a role to play.

“We need everybody to help ... If everybody is relying on our city to do it, we don’t have enough manpower or money,” he said.

Read: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declares state of emergency after Friday’s severe weather

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