BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) – While many have enjoyed the parades of carnival season and collected a number of beads, one Louisiana lawmaker is proposing plans that will ensure remnants of Mardi Gras are cleaned up.
Once the parades roll though, there’s often a large-scale cleanup of the beads, confetti, and trash that have been left behind. State Rep. Foy Gadberry, R-West Monroe, has filed HB23, which mandates that cities or parishes require organizations hosting parades clean the litter within 24 hours.
Under the bill, the organizers would pay the city a deposit to ensure the cleanup takes place. The city or parish would establish its own rules to determine the methods of litter removal, the amount of the deposit, the extent to which the area should be cleansed, and create any sort of punishment for organizations that do not meet the set requirements. One consequence might be that the city or parish keeps the deposit money.
Should the bill pass, it would leave some of the control and requirements up to the governing authority, but it would also require that they adopt the ordinance under state law.
Though many cities already have cleanup plans in place, this would put some of the burden on the parade hosts rather than the city.
The bill will be debated in the regular session, which begins on April 10.
