If you see John Panko (our Downtown Auburn Business Improvement

District Beautification Crew member) on the street picking up garbage or shoveling snow, please take the opportunity to thank him for all that he does to keep downtown looking clean.

If you don't know John, you'll recognize him as the gentleman working alongside our new pick-up truck with the BID logo on the side. With help from the city, we recently purchased the new vehicle so John can do his job much more efficiently. And, quite a job it is.

In the course of a given week, John picks up about a dozen 60-gallon bags worth of litter off the streets and sidewalks of downtown. In addition, he has been responsible for emptying the garbage from 28 street trash receptacles each week. Some of these must be emptied multiple times weekly to prevent overflow.

All told, John is responsible for removing approximately 1,750 gallons of garbage from the streets of downtown in a typical week. In the fall, he also removes an additional 3,000 gallons of leaves from the streets weekly.

This is certainly not all of the garbage and debris on the streets in downtown. John does not have the time to get it all.

But, just think about what it would look like if he was not out there keeping the streets clean.

There is a lot that BID businesses and the general public can do to help John. The easiest thing, of course, is to refrain from littering. There are plenty of street receptacles downtown. Please use them to deposit your garbage. Also, if you see litter on the street, it would be helpful to pick it up and put it in a receptacle.

Another way to help is to refrain from putting business or personal residential garbage in the downtown receptacles. The purpose of these receptacles is to reduce litter and to give pedestrians a convenient way to dispose of coffee cups, food wrappers or other small items. When businesses or individuals dump large bags of their own garbage in these cans, they fill up quickly and overflow. John then must spend much more time emptying them and picking the overflowing garbage off the streets.

If we all do our part to reduce the amount of garbage John needs to remove from the streets each week, he will be able to attend to the finer details of beautifying downtown Auburn - such as removing gum and cigarette butts, weeding, sweeping sidewalks and doing other things that currently he does not have the time to do.

Let's all do our part to help John keep downtown Auburn looking good.

In other news:

Members of the public can sign up to receive a BID quarterly newsletter.

The BID Tidbits quarterly newsletter will be returning in the next couple of weeks after a brief hiatus.

The newsletter will help inform members and the public about the efforts being undertaken by the BID office and about news and activities in downtown Auburn.

It will be available in both hard copy and digital format.

The newsletter will be mailed to all BID members. Also, a PDF version of the newsletter will be sent to all of those on our e-mail list.

Hard copies will be available at the BID office and at several downtown businesses.

We will also mail and/or e-mail the newsletter to anyone else who is interested.

To sign up to be added to our newsletter mail or e-mail list, simply call the office at 252-7874 or send an e-mail to aubdpbid@CentralNY.TWCBC.com.

Dan Schuster is director of the Downtown Auburn BID.