You know you're dealing with a hard-core activist when her idea of "heartwarming" involves disappearing garbage.

Cindy Beckett, who crusades to save and repair wetlands, spent Saturday, July 7, on Portland Avenue picking up beer cans, food wrappers and all manner of other roadside trash with Midland Resident's Assn. volunteers.

"As usual, the area nearest 72nd Street was the worst," she said. "When we were done, we drove our truck and trailer along Portland Ave. to pick up all the bags and piled them in one location at 85th and Portland to make it easier for the county pick up the following Monday. It was a pretty good pile."

No kidding.

And all those bags beg the question: What kind of person tosses junk out of their car, assuming that some other person won't mind picking it up?

"On Sunday afternoon, I noticed that the pile was smaller," Cindy continued. "Then Stacy (Emerson) drove by even later and noticed it was even smaller. That evening I drove by again and it was smaller still."

The two were puzzled. It was clearly garbage in those bags. Who'd want them?

"Then we realized - the locals, bless their hearts, must have thought that someone had come into our beloved Midland and dumped their garbage on us, so they were taking the bags away a few to a time to put in their own garbage cans," Beckett said. "By the time the crew got there Monday, over half of the pile was gone. Now that's what I call community spirit!"

Tacoma Rail may have clocked the fastest-ever remedy to a neighborhood's complaint.

The rotten economy has slowed the railroad business along with everything else. That means fewer cars are hauling freight, and more are sitting idle. Tacoma Rail makes most of its money by running cars, but its managers are using sidings to store cars. The demurrage fees paid by the car owners help support the city-owned railroad.

Two sets of those cars were working for and against a healthy city.

Since early February, several strings of black tanker cars had sat idle on sidings between 72nd and 60th streets west of McKinley Avenue.

They were making money for Tacoma Rail. But they were irking residents in the neighborhood. Who wants an empty asphalt tanker sitting indefinitely beside the back fence? Who wants the taggers who can't resist that big black space to spray paint gang signs?

Glenn Sukys asked if we could find out what was, or had been, in the cars. He guessed they were empty, guessed asphalt and was right on both counts.

He wanted to know how long they'd remain what he considered an attractive nuisance in a neighborhood that's had some crime and foreclosure problems. As of Thursday, the answer was: Until people are buying asphalt again.

Sukys' questions got managers at Tacoma Rail asking themselves the right questions about the effect on the neighborhood and alternative storage.

Over the weekend they had the cars moved to a siding elsewhere on the tracks.

In the future, they'll be more mindful of the people whose homes abut Tacoma Rail tracks.

How remarkable is this?

It's huge. A major public utility moves dozens of rail cars within a couple of days of hearing complaints about them.

Of course, now that the cars are moved, a good deal of the junk people have dumped along the tracks is more visible. The old sofas and mattresses present the perfect payback opportunity: Tacoma's rife with neighborhood clean-ups in the summer. When the dumpsters come to the 'hood, the folks who live along the tracks can thank the railroad, and help themselves, by hauling that junk out of the right of way and into the trash.

It began with a two-mile ride at lunch. Scott McElhiney then worked up to bicycling seven miles when he could steal a few minutes. Soon he was up to a 20-mile round-trip commute to work almost every day.

And cycling became a new lifestyle for the 44-year-old Midland mechanic.

McElhiney hadn’t ridden a bicycle in about 10 years when inspiration hit. He spent much of his day after returning from work in front of his computer or staring at the television.

“I felt like I might be dead in a few years if I kept at it,” he said.

He later joined the Tacoma Wheelmen's Bicycle Club on longer trips and began cycling to work in University Place, 10 miles from his home.

“It was a good workout that left me energized at the start of work,” he said. “And it turned out that my commute time by bike was within about 10 minutes of my car time.”

His waistline began shrinking shortly after he began biking. His blood pressure and pulse rate are down. His endurance is up. He’s 50 pounds lighter than when he started; last summer, he was dropping about five points a week.

He goes on longer rides on the weekends. Destinations include Olympia, Belfair, Renton and South Prairie. He’s logged all his trips and has ridden more than 3,800 miles since last summer. He passed the 1,600-mile mark for this year earlier this week.

“I’ve gotten to see more of the region since last July than I've seen since moving here around 1990,” he said.

Got an e-mail about a scam in the Midland area. Read about it below:

My husband was out working in the yard yesterday, when a nice looking, nicely dressed man stopped and said that he noticed our car had some minor bumper damage. So my husband, knowing that I really wanted to get it fixed someday, but just couldn’t afford it, came into the house and asked me to come out and talk to the man.

Well, he said that he worked for Lakes Auto Body and moonlighted on his time off and just drives around looking for dented cars. He said that our car would probably cost $1,500 to get it fixed, but that he would fix it for $500. He said that we would not have to pay him until he was finished and that he would fix it right now and right where the car was sitting. Well, I thought I was getting a deal when I talked him down to $450. He accepted this if I would pay him cash. So my husband went to the bank and got the money.

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From crime reporter Stacey Mulick:

Midland-area residents are invited to a town hall meeting tonight at Franklin Pierce High School to talk about crime and public safety issues in their area.

The meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. in the cafeteria at the high school, 11002 18th Ave. E. Pierce County Council members Barbara Gelman and Calvin Goings, Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor, Prosecutor Gerald Horne and representatives from Safe Streets will be featured.

"Public feedback is needed to help strengthen our crime fighting efforts," a flier for the event states. "Please join us and fight out more about this important topic."

Several community groups will host a public forum about the problems concerning the Pierce County Jail on Thursday at The Evergreen State College.

Click below to read the press release:

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I just got off the phone with Rae Anne Giron, who's coordinating the homeless count for Pierce County. She said didn't have any early indicators of trends.

But she said it appears there isn’t a major migration from Tacoma to unincorporated parts of Pierce County following the city’s aggressive panhandling ban and its closure of homeless camps.

“I spoke with (Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness) teams, and they haven’t seen areas of major growth in the unincorporated parts,” she said. “Individuals are more attracted to metropolitan areas, and they’re used to the services they can find there. So if they’re moving, they’re likely moving to other metropolitan areas.”

Check out my story about Internet crimefighting in today's paper, and then check out these links to Stacy Emerson's YouTube channel and the StopCrimeOnTacomaAve channel.

The Department of Health and Human Services has launched an investigation into the October discovery of prescription bottles originating from the Kmart at 1414 72nd Street East in Midland.

Community activist Stacy Emerson, who discovered the bottles near a homeless camp behind the store, forwarded The News Tribune an e-mail from an equal-opportunity specialist with the Office for Civil Rights, which oversees the medical-privacy law known as HIPPA. The department reviewed and approved the investigation, the e-mail states.

No timeline for completion was provided, but the specialist did say the department is investigating a large number of other complaints.

Emerson estimates there were about 50 bottles. The labels on about 25 of them contained identifiers like names, addresses, phone numbers and birthdates.

A agency spokeswoman earlier had told The News Tribune the department couldn't comment on an investigation before it is completed.

I talked earlier with Stacy Emerson, the community activist whose video about homeless camps near East 72nd Street and Portland Avenue in Midland drew much attention.

You'll likely be hearing more from her. She and her son have purchased higher-quality cameras so they can produce multi-angle videos. She registered a Web site to post the videos herself. And she hopes to release another video by the end of the month.

"We live in a society these days where you can’t believe it until you see it – whatever it may be," she said. "It sure does help to have digital technology to allow us to see it on our computer screens."

The number of homeless is rising across Pierce County, but the City of Tacoma’s housing program seems to be a success. Still, several residents at a joint session of city and county public safety and human services committee weren’t happy with the overall situation.

Richard Anderson-Connolly, a professor at the University of Puget Sound, provided to the councils what he called a “progress report” based on polling of those who entered the city’s program to move homeless persons off the streets and into houses.

He provided statistics which show that, so far, the program is a success. Visits to the emergency room are down, and visits to other healthcare facilities are up. Those moved into housing self-report less victimization. Surveys showed that, on average, those involved report they feel safer, happier, more hopeful, less depressed, less lonely, less angry and less tired.

“Every change, you could say, moves in a beneficial direction," Anderson-Connolly said.

The county, which pledged last year to cut homelessness in half over the next decade, reported a 14 percent increase in its 2006 count, though it hopes the count will be down in this year’s count. The biggest challenge it faces, a county representative said, is recruiting agencies to help. He said the county has the capacity for two or three more agencies.

Pierce County also reported that 65 percent of those placed in housing programs are leaving before one year.

“Often we don’t know where they’ve gone,” he said. “Are they homeless again? We can’t tell.”

Anderson-Connolly likened the homeless balance between the city and the unincorporated parts of the county to a balloon – squeeze it, and the volume doesn’t change; it just moves. He said that can actually be problematic because a lower density of the homeless and can make it more difficult to help.

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Apparently the problem of the homeless camps at East 72nd Street and Portland Avenue hasn’t completely gone away. A church had cleaned up part of the camps, but community activist Stacy Emerson said they still appear active.

I’ve got an e-mail into the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department for reaction.

Part of the letter from Emerson is after the jump:

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