Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake and the Department of Public Works are challenging Baltimore City communities to get involved and get Baltimore growing – starting right in our own neighborhoods.
Baltimore is getting back to basics and asking communities to join us in tackling their sanitation challenges block by block. It is time to promote positive behaviors and set a new standard of clean for our City.
All official community associations are invited to participate in this friendly competition.
Update
There will be regular updates as to the progress of the Clean Community Competition at least monthly. Since the total number of points depends on scoring a mixture of quick quantifiable criteria - recycling tonnage and service requests decreases – and qualitative factors (before and after photos, scrapbooks and judges’ visits), it would be misleading to rank the communities on the quantitative measures alone.
However, that should not preclude us from ranking the participations in the various quantifiable categories. Sensing one’s place in a competition can spur the contestants to greater efforts in order to advance. One does not enter a contest with the aim of placing or showing. They want to win!
At present, the Bureau of Solid Waste is setting benchmarks in several categories in order to track the decrease/increase: service requests for dirty streets, dirty alleys and corner can collections. We also will start tracking recycling tonnage. Participants will be ranked in order for each of these measurements so they can measure their progress.
We will also ask participants to provide us with photos of their efforts in sweeping drains, cleaning vacant lots and other cleaning activities so they can be shared on the web. We can also network these activities with DPW’s Twitter accounts and Facebook page. In this way, we can also stimulate a conversation with all the participants and set the groundwork for a healthy and productive competition.