"I wonder if Mayor Jimmy Weekley's Clean Up Key West campaign is just all talk," said Simonton Street resident John Harbeson this week. "He's got city employees out walking the streets trying to identify `eyesores,'— but when I called him about the litter left every day around the Greyhound bus stop near my home, he didn't seem to have much interest," Harbeson said.
Harbeson explained that, when Greyhound moved its station out of Old Town to the airport, a bus stop was set up in the 1100 block of Simonton.
"There are sometimes a couple of dozen people waiting, right next door to my house," Harbeson said. "And they just leave their trash behind for the residents to clean up. In most cases, I go out and sweep it up because I'm embarrassed about how the street looks.
"If the City would just put a trash can there and keep it emptied, maybe the people waiting for the bus would put their litter in it rather than just leaving it on the street.
"It's not that the City doesn't have some extra cans," Harbeson said. "Many of the old ones were replaced by those new $900 beauties they put downtown."
Harbeson said he called Weekley about the problem.
"He told me he would call Greyhound," Harbeson said. "But that's a public street. I don't know why Greyhound would have any more responsibility for keeping it trash-free than the Old Town Trolley folks would have for the areas around their stopping points.
"In the meantime, people waiting for the bus are still trashing my neighborhood."