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16 FEBRUARY, 2022
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Waste not...
Leticia Ines Caceres has taken it upon herself to clean up the rubbish left in the streets around Footscray.
268106 (Damjan Janevski)
West Footscray’s self described ‘crazy rubbish collecting lady’ is tackling litter one piece at a time, taking it upon herself to clean up the area that she calls home while encouraging others in the community to join her. Leticia Ines Caceres started cleaning up the West Footscray – Footscray area during lockdown. Ms Caceres noticed rubbish, particularly masks, were being left in public spaces due to the fact that they were being used more by locals. “That really started to stress me out because I had seen images online of masks wrapped around the feet of animals and creatures, sea creatures, and I found that really upsetting and distressing,” she said. “I just couldn’t bear it and I started walking with my dog and a pair of kitchen tongs and some gloves in a bag and I just started collecting stuff. I realised that within two or three blocks that my bag was absolutely brimming with garbage.” She found a lot of support when she shared her rubbish collecting expeditions on community Facebook page ‘WeFolk’. With Clean up Australia day coming up on March 6, Ms Caceres said her aim is to mobilise the ‘WeFolk’ community. She said walking and collecting rubbish was “good for your legs, it’s good for your heart and good for the environment”.
Win for mobile vendors By Molly Magennis
12533599-HC07-22
Hobsons Bay’s controversial mobile vendors policy has finally been settled, with major adjustments made to meet the community and trader feedback the policy received. The original policy received criticism from many in the community, including ice cream truck vendor Albert Cerminara, for the exclusion zone which prevented vendors from setting up 500 metres from brick and mortar businesses and activity centres. and $12,000 annual permit fee for roaming vendors.
Speaking to Star Weekly in April 2021, Mr. Cerminara said the policy was unreasonable and unfair, and compared it to Maribyrnong’s vendor policy, which only had an annual fee of $3152.50. After receiving conflicting community feedback, council decided in September 2021 to defer the draft policy to the council’s first meeting in 2022. At a council meeting on February 8, a range of significant updates were made to the policy, including a change to the exclusion zone, which will now be 100 metres. Exclusion zones will also not apply when
bricks and mortar businesses are closed, and the annual permit for roaming vendors has now been slashed to $3850. The majority of the councillors voted in favour of the policy, except mayor Peter Hemphill and Cr Pamela Sutton-Legaud. “After the considerable amount of work that’s gone on by the staff to get community consultation and also to integrate those changes that we’ve made on several occasions, this seems to be another opportunity to just water down what’s being recommended, and I’d love to understand the logic for it,” Cr Sutton-Legaud said.
Mr Cerminara, who runs the Mr Fresh Ice Cream truck, said the amendments to the policy were great news for his business. “They’ve adopted a neighbouring council’s policy and brought those measures in and for that, I thank them and absolutely, it’s great news,” he said. “What the council’s fantastically done is adopt Yarra’s policy which absolutely works and has worked for many years, and it’s what the council officers, the administrator, should have done from the start rather than mucking around.” The policy will be trialled for a year.
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