Efforts to Keep Lincoln County Beautiful appear to be payingoff, according to results of a recent litter survey conducted bythe organization.

The 2001 survey placed the county’s overall litter rating at1.95 on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being no litter and 4 beingextremely littered. This year’s total was down from the 2000 ratingof 2.08.

“We think we’ve had significant improvement this year over lastyear,” said Homer Richardson, survey coordinator for KLCB.

In the survey, groups of KLCB members surveyed 15randomly-selected sites in the city plus 15 sites in each of thefive county supervisor districts.

At each site, members judged the areas as 1 – no litter, 2 -slightly littered, 3 – littered or 4 – extremely littered. Theindividual totals were then averaged for the respective districtand county-wide ratings.

“Most of it was slightly littered. That’s pretty good,”Richardson said in discussing results.

Richardson said “slightly littered” means the area could becleaned up in a short amount of time.

In four of the six survey areas, the city and Districts Threethrough Five, the litter ratings fell.

District Three’s drop led the way, falling from 2.35 in 2000 to1.93 this year. District Five had the lowest individual rate at1.66, which was down from 2.01 in 2000.

District Two’s rating stayed the same at 1.93 for the two-yearperiod.

District One was the only area to post a rating increase, goingfrom 2.26 in 2000 to 2.35 in 2001.

“We have to do this survey every year,” Richardson said. “It’sthe same one done by every certified community.”

KLCB officials said the location of surveyed sites wereconfidential.

In doing the survey, they acknowledged that teams occasionallypassed up littered areas to inspect non-littered areas and viceversa. In general, Richardson said areas around low water bridgesseemed to be especially littered.

KLCB and county officials were pleased with the latestratings.

“As we can see from these numbers, we’re heading in the rightdirection,” said Chancery Clerk Tillmon Bishop, mentioning thesheriff’s department’s litter clean-up crews and KLCB’s publicawareness and education efforts.

Richardson agreed.

“There are some things we’re doing that are showing up on thenumbers,” he said.

Richardson indicated that getting an area cleaned up the firsttime is an important step. He said once an area is cleaned up,people tend to take pride in that fact and don’t litter asmuch.

“Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job,” Richardsonsaid.