A major littering issue is prompting one village mayor’s office to take matters into their own hands despite limited resources. It’s all thanks to their staff lending their own time, energy and trailer to remove abandoned cars from Yigo roadways.

The mayor’s office has been hitting the road, cleaning up the northern village one junk car at a time, using employee Ethan Cruz’s personal truck and trailer.

“It’s actually at no cost (to us). My staff is the one who is doing it with his own private vehicle and that’s his choice. We’re doing what we can. And as far as disposal, we’ve been taking them down to DPW. So that kind of helps us with funding,” said Yigo Mayor Frances S. Lizama. 

Lizama says it all started just before the start of the new school year after hearing of several abandoned cars near bus stops and along school routes. 

“Seeing all the messages on the Yigo chat, we’ve been keeping up with all that and that’s where we’ve been seeing a lot of the reports of abandoned vehicles along the roadway, some as recent as yesterday,” Lizama added. 

Now, they’re continuing the effort, slowly but surely across the village.

“I’d say for the first week, he did about six vehicles. Then, the past week, I’d say maybe about the same amount, because it’s one vehicle at a time. We’re cleaning the village up, one vehicle at a time,” Lizama said. 

But the road ahead looks a mile long. Lizama emphasizes the immediate area of concern are public easements, not private properties. 

Though another major headache continues to be CHamoru Land Trust property, where she says there’s more than a handful of junk cars. 

“There’s two properties in particular and I’ve communicated with CLTC on that, with regards to one in Mataguac and one in Ysengsong. I’m waiting for feedback from CLTC on that,” she said.

Disposal of these eyesores continues to be a challenge for all villages. 

She says the Mayors Council of Guam put up a bid for transport and disposal of junk cars islandwide, but that’s facing a roadblock. 

“In order for this program to work, we have to have both. But because there was no bidder for disposal, we can’t move forward with the project. So it leaves us to take it into our own hands to do what we can,” she added. 

For now, her office is doing what they can with the resources they have, even going the extra mile to give owners a chance before they can get slapped with up to a thousand dollar litter citation. 

“I’d like to give the owner the benefit of the doubt. What we do is we get the license plate and vin number and have GPD run it for us. We get the information and I try to call the owners to give them that chance to remove it without getting cited,” she said. 

That effort proved fruitful as three owners already removed their junk cars on their own. 

Meantime, she reminds the community, “Although we all pay the abandoned vehicle fee, the fee that we pay doesn’t even cover half the cost that we pay to get it removed. But again, we try to do our best.”