Stephanie McColaugh is taking a victory lap after the April 25 Clean Up Everett event at Gateway Park, and on the basic facts, fair enough. According to remarks published in the Everett Independent, more than 200 people showed up, volunteers covered more than a mile of trails, and the group says it collected “approximately 800 cubic feet of litter,” including “discarded couches and car bumpers, to plastic wrappers.”
That is real work. Everett has enough illegal dumping, roadside trash, and neglected industrial edges without pretending otherwise. If people gave up a day to haul junk out of Gateway Park, that matters more than a dozen branded tote bags and a speech about sustainability.
McColaugh, who founded Clean Up Everett and also serves on the Planning Board, thanked Mayor Robert Van Campen, his administration, DPW, Facilities and Maintenance, Tom Philbin, the Mystic River Watershed Association, and Casey-Lee Bastien with BSC. She said, “Clean Up Everett is deeply grateful to the more than 200 residents of Everett, Mayor Van Campen and his administration… for coming together to make this event a success.”
She also credited the division of labor plainly enough: “BSC and MyRWA led the planting efforts, while Clean Up Everett led the cleanup activities.”
The planting side was not small. Casey Lee Bastien of BSC said, “We planted several hundred native trees and shrubs, more than 12 species selected for their air quality benefits and food for wildlife.” Daria Santollani of the Mystic River Watershed Association added that Gateway Park “is undergoing a transformation to build a healthy wetland habitat, construct new trails, reduce pollution, and increase flood storage.”
Good. That is the kind of environmental work that is hard to argue with. Pick up trash. Plant trees. Improve flood storage. Build trails. Nobody needs a graduate seminar to understand the value.
It also puts a familiar Everett question back on the table: why is practical cleanup so much easier to unite around than the city’s endless performance politics?
When the job is lifting couches out of the brush, people can cooperate. City departments show up. Outside groups help. Volunteers work. The result is visible. There is no need for panic language, no need to invent a villain, no need to turn every land-use question into a moral crusade.
McColaugh said the event should “raise awareness” about “ongoing littering and pollution challenges that affect Everett.” Fair enough. Everett does have those challenges. It has them because for years too much land was treated as somebody else’s dumping ground and too little was maintained like it belonged to the people living here.
Clean Up Everett says it hosted 15 cleanups last year and plans at least one each month. That is useful civic work. If the city wants cleaner parks, riverbanks, and industrial edges, this is the part worth copying: show up, bring gloves, fill the bags, haul the junk away.
Gateway Park is an asset. The fact that volunteers had to pull out couches and car parts is also a reminder that Everett’s problems are usually less mysterious than the political class likes to make them sound. A place gets cleaner when people clean it. A place improves when somebody maintains it. Not everything requires a campaign.