"Oink, Oink": Domesticating Litterpigs

When I put out my curbside-recyclables last Friday (Tuesday is paper; Friday is glass, metal, and plastic), I saw that the melting of the snow revealed a MESS on my frontage. I own a one-family house in Vailsburg, a semi-suburban area in westernmost Newark that used to be a separate town, and have a double urban lot, 55 feet wide by 100 feet deep. The 55-foot side was marred by bits of litter everywhere.
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I got a plastic bag, and started to clean up. 119 pieces of trash later, I was finished!
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Newark, like most cities in this country, has a litter problem. We've got to come up with a cure.
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In good weather, this neighborhood is kept pretty clean by the residents, but pedestrians, and especially schoolkids, have a bad habit of dropping trash as they walk. Even adults who grew up without being severely reproached for strewing garbage, act like two-year-olds. They eat on the street and when they've finished with their candy bar, soda, or burger, they just drop the wrapper wherever they happen to be, as tho all the world is to clean up after them. We're not their mother. It's not our job to clean up after perennial infants. Public slobs make a mess of our cities and roadsides. We need to make trash-strewing socially unacceptable.
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We can do some of that by imposing severe fines — say, $100 for a first offense — and forced labor as punishments for tossing garbage onto public property. Let's make a second littering offense punishable by 10 hours of cleanup duty, in which litterers are bunched into work crews in dayglow-orange vests and compelled to clean up sidewalks, vacant lots, and parks, in a single long day. Hand each a sturdy plastic bag and a "reacher", a stick with a grabber at one end and a squeeze handle on the other by means of which one can pick things up without stooping.
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Indeed, for people who'd rather hold onto their cash, we can offer cleanup duty in a 'clean team' (New York City subways have such teams, tho theirs comprise paid employees) as an alternative to paying the first-offense fine, so people who have more time than money can keep their cash but pay their debt to society nonetheless.
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If there's a third offense, compel 100 hours of cleanup time. A fourth offense, 1,000 hours! Word would get out very quickly that we're not playing around. We want clean streets, and will make slobs clean up after themselves.
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It would be much better if we could simply nip this problem in the bud, by teaching people when they are young that, as we used to say when I was a child, "Cleanliness is next to godliness". Do Newark's churches still teach that? Maybe it needs new emphasis.
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Even more important than the churches, tho, are the schools. Our schools are plainly not doing their job if they do not inculcate in children the understanding that they are not entitled to strew garbage and force other people to clean up after them. So let me propose to Newark schools an anti-litter campaign.
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The word we now use for people who strew trash in public is "litterbug". That is much too gentle. Let's make a little change, to "litterpig", and encourage kids who see other kids littering to shout "Oink, oink — litterpig!" Kids love to call each other names and point out each other's faults. Let's use that natural inclination to combat filth.
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Schools can run their own cleanup programs, as punishments and as volunteer projects. If a kid is caught strewing trash, assign him or her to a day of Working Detention during which s/he will wear a vest and clean up the halls, schoolyard, and sidewalks out front, scrub away graffiti, etc. Short of detention, minor infractions can be rebuked with a public "Oink, oink!" from the teacher in front of the rest of the class, plus a stern command to pick up the mess or get Working Detention.
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Such a habit might spread quickly from teacher to student, from classroom to playground, streets, and elsewhere. Kids should be warned not to be disrespectful to parents and other adults, but we can expect that once the "Oink, oink!" habit is established it will make itself felt everywhere.
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Aside from the power of negative reinforcement and peer pressure in having kids rebuke each other for littering, schools could promote cleanliness as a positive virtue, a collective responsibility that also improves the quality of life.
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Individual classrooms or school clubs could "adopt" a local park or vacant lot and periodically clean it up, clear the sidewalks of snow, etc. A sign on a chain-link fence ("This park has been adopted by the Clean Team of Room 202, Camden Middle School") or other acknowledgment will give the kids public credit, and many kids crave favorable notice. Better a sign like this than a graffiti 'tag'.
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Adopting a park or vacant lot would give kids a feeling of accomplishment, and after all their hard work, they are not going to want to see it get dirty again so will actively discourage people from tossing trash there — or, likely, anywhere.
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Garbage-filled public spaces are oppressive. They give everyone surrounded by them a sense that things are out of control, disordered, hopeless. A clean and orderly environment, conversely, lets people feel that maybe things aren't so bad after all. And seeing a dirty lot or park suddenly become clean makes a powerful, if subliminal, impression on people, that things are getting better. But they can't get better if as soon as some of us clean up, others start dumping garbage again.
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Thus it's important to enlist kids in using the power of public denunciation to curb bad behavior. In shaming other kids, they also shame adults within earshot.
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Let's clean up Newark by calling trash-strewing slobs "litterpigs" on signs and public posters, and urging kids to reproach such slobs with a very public "Litterpig! Oink, oink!"

Arena Contract Signed

The Star-Ledger headline read, "Newark, Devils make arena a reality
For $210 million investment, city gets ownership rights and minimum $2 million in annual rent for 30 years". Hmm. That doesn't sound right, does it? Newark taxpayers have to spend $210 million to get $60 million back? And will there be a Devils team after this failed NHL season? Or is the NHL a dead letter, a league that is going out of business completely and will have nothing to offer Newark?
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We mustn't hedge our bets but must build a facility that can serve MANY other purposes than hockey.
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The Star-Ledger spells out more, disturbing details:

Newark will own the arena and receive a minimum annual rent of $2 million, or 7 percent of all revenues from suites, concessions, naming rights and advertising revenues and 4 percent of the revenue from all other arena events, such as concerts, up to a maximum of $6 million a year for the first decade of the lease agreement.

Huh? We own the stadium but are entitled to only "4 percent of the revenue from all other arena events, such as concerts", and there's a CAP on how much we can make from our own property? That's crazy!
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There is some sweetening to this deal:

In addition to the arena, the Devils will also be responsible for building a 300-room hotel, a community center and 100,000 square feet of office space.

Is that an absolute, ironclad commitment? If so, maybe it's not so bad a deal.

David Swindell, a professor of public administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said that with the Devils paying for maintenance and the city sharing in the revenues, Newark may have struck a deal that's better than many other publicly financed arenas.

"It seems like they are coming into this deal with their eyes more wide open than other cities," said Swindell.

This would be more reassuring if the guy's name didn't bring to mind the word "swindle".
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I don't see that Newark should be told what it can do with its own property when the Devils are not using it. I really don't.
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Nor should we permit a design to be constructed that is so lacking in flexibility as to minimize the number of uses this large public space could be put to. Yes, we should be able to host concerts there. But we should also get a CONVENTION CENTER out of the deal, either wholly contained within the arena or in conjunction with the hotel the Devils are to develop. Newark has no convention center! That's shocking, and must be remedied.
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Perhaps Mayor James is so eager to get something really started, and let other things follow later, once Newark's image has been changed by tens of thousands of white people flocking happily to Downtown Newark and not being murdered, that he is willing to sell Newark short on this particular facility. If that's the best deal he could get, I guess it's better to get something than nothing. Ten years from now, we should be able to do much better in courting major facilities. This is an exciting time.