Seriously? Littering a parking lot with a couch?

TUESDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — Some people will do anything to get out of paying a landfill fee. Such as the bozo who deposited an old couch — and a pretty ugly one at that — in the parking lot across Mission Flats Road from the City’s old public works department.

Did the owner think somebody might like to sit a spell in the parking lot? Not likely.

The former public works department property is still in use by a couple of organizations, and for occasional storage. Couch person probably didn’t know that, figuring the parking lot to be nothing more than a convenient place to get rid of an unwanted piece of furniture.

Anyone guilty of such dumping should be heavily penalized for littering, with an extra heavy fine for having extremely bad taste in interior decorating.

Illegal dumping in remote areas has long been a problem in the Kamloops region. Garbage, construction waste, junk of all kinds finds its way into some of the loveliest natural areas we have, desecrating them.

It is the exact opposite of community spirit. Many people work hard, both through beautification and cleanup programs, to make our community better while others — in just a few minutes of stupidity — soil it. Now, apparently, the problem has moved from the rural areas into the urban core.

Littering fines in B.C. are among the highest in the country, ranging up to a couple of thousand dollars, which is a good thing. In Kamloops, a littering fine is typically $500.

Problem is, they’re almost never handed out. The offence has to be so egregious and so public that it simply can’t be ignored.

It’s hard to catch litterers, just as it’s hard to catch graffiti vandals, but these types of offences aren’t high on the list of policing and bylaw enforcement, anyway. Maybe we do need a few high-profile prosecutions to make the point.

Maybe we could start with the couch potatohead who littered that parking lot. If we could catch him, or her.