With over 100,000 people expected to have attended the International Bar-B-Q Festival and thousands of pounds of meat being cooked and prepared on those same streets, a substantial amount of trash can accumulate. While the City of Owensboro does ensure trucks cover the frequently-traveled areas and get the bulk of the waste left on the street, the fine details become a community effort.
Early Sunday morning, City workers and members of the Public Works Department pressure-washed the streets as others placed items back in their respective places. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) had the labor-intensive job of scraping the leftover duct tape off of the sidewalk that marked the vendor sites for the Bar-B-Q Festival.
Another method used for assisting with the details involved in city clean up was enlisting the help of inmates at the Daviess County Detention Center (DCDC).
For more than 10 years, Deputy Wayne Burns and a small group of inmates from the jail walk the downtown streets and parking lots, picking up trash and discarded items. With the wind blowing, and so many city blocks to cover, Burns and the inmates worked systematically.
“Deputy Wayne Burns occasionally gives up part of his weekend to be a supervisor with the road crew,” said Jailer Art Maglinger, adding that the community inmate work crew performed diverse tasks in the community for nonprofit entities and government agencies, including picking up trash and mowing the grounds at local parks.
According to Maglinger, in order to be selected for the inmate work crew, inmates need to be Class C or D felons (not convicted of a violent or sexual offense) and then must be classified and approved by the Department of Corrections. Once those classifications have been made, the jail staff decides who has good institutional behavior and chooses those inmates for the work crew.
Although the work crew did at one time go out on Saturday evenings after the Bar-B-Q Festival was over, with the large number of people in attendance, Maglinger said the crew now goes out first thing on Sunday morning to eliminate the risk that inmates could talk to families or acquire contraband, thereby putting the deputy in danger.
Maglinger said Burns’ training and experience ensure both his own safety and that of the inmates.
“He’s trained they’re not supposed to go to their pockets when picking up trash,” Maglinger said. “He’s a good ruler enforcer to have supervising it. They respect him and I don’t think they would challenge him.”
With most of the inmates near their parole eligibility date, it diminishes the flight risk.
“I think it’s a small token they can give back to the community,” Maglinger said. “They’re serving time for what they’ve been convicted of, so it allows them to go downtown to be out of their cells for a bit.”
