Sunday afternoon I shot this video along Main and Fulton counting 129 coffee cups. Did I pick them up? No I did not...not my job.
Monday morning, I sent a tweet to our Mayor Brad Woodside with the above video attached expressing my disgust of this mess. Within an hour I received a tweet back from him that read:
Agree. I will bring it up.RT @pam_wheaton: @Chaf @bradwoodside @frederictonnews Good for you Chafic! It's an excellent, and very simple idea
It's great to live in a city where your mayor actually directly responds to tweets every day. And it's actually him, I've seen him tweet in the past. I was excited that he had seen the video (assuming) and said that he would bring it up.
Well yesterday morning, a friend of mine notified me that Capital FM had reported that councillor Bruce Grandy brought the issue up in a council-in-committee session Monday night. He was also very disappointed by the mess left behind and proposed that garbage cans should be made available for next year's parade!
Here is a clip of Grandy discussing the issue on Capital FM:
http://www.capitalfm.ca/Channels/News/Story.aspx?ID=1578403
Now I'm not sure if I can take all the credit here. The Article in the Gleaner mentions that Coun. Grandy was approached by some people at a local northside eatery, but either way I'm glad that a few complaints is actually getting something done in this city.
The next step is to try to get a meeting with Mr Grandy and possibly Mr Woodside to discuss my photography project and see if there is anything the city could do to encourage changing our nasty North American coffee culture. Our fast food, drive thru nation is making our city ugly and it's up to Frederictonians to make a difference here.
If you're on the twitters, please take a minute to thank Mayor Woodside and Bruce Grandy for taking the lead on this issue.
