By Fawn Porter/Staff Writer

Mustang Mayor Jeff Landrith isn’t against fireworks, but all that lingers the following the day.

Landrith said the city was a “free for all” on July 4, with excessive crowds, public drinking and, of course, the trash.

“I don’t want to be the one against fireworks,” Landrith said. “And, I’m not. But I am tired of seeing people come to our community and trash this place.”

He said his biggest concerns with the event are debris and safety — a large quantity of one, and not enough of the other.

“There were people shooting (fireworks) at each other,” he said. “It may be one thing if you’re a couple of kids on your own property, but with such a high density of people (it’s unsafe.)”

Landrith said he knows the civic organizations who sell fireworks make an effort to clean up the debris — and it’s a good effort — but a lot of little trash remains.
“Don’t get me wrong, they work their butts off,”

Landrith said. “But it’s still pretty trashy.” He added that it still looked 10 times better than it did.

Walking through Wild Horse Park Friday, Landrith picked up leftover trash and pointed out the little pieces of debris he said he’s found evidence of lingering almost a year later.

“It doesn’t go away,” he said. “I found stuff back in May that was still here” from the previous Fourth of July.

He added he’d “just as soon see them (fireworks) banned from the park.”

Landrith said one suggestion would be for a stronger police presence in the park. He said there was a heavy presence on July 4, but officers stayed in their cars instead of walking through the park.

“I think if (the police) would have walked through and said ‘Hey sir, don’t leave your beer cans,’ they would have picked them up,” he said.

Landrith said one officer stood at a corner and about four carloads of people stopped what they were doing and began to gather their trash.

“It was amazing,” he said. “He just stood there … you could tell he’d done this before.”

One course of action for the debris would be to install a fining system, he said.

“I couldn’t get away with throwing my Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket and beer bottles down in front of a policeman without being fined,” he said. “And yet you can on the Fourth of July? What I saw wasn’t ‘this is my pile of trash,’ but beer cans 10-feet out, kind of chunked.”

He said police officers need all of the help they can get, and as a city, officials should work together to find a way to combat the trash.

One surprising thing Landrith discovered on July 4 was the legality of public drinking in the park.

“There was a lot of drinking going on,” he said. “I asked one of the officers, and he said it was legal unless it was hard liquor.”

Mustang Police Capt. Willard James said there is no ordinance that forbids drinking in the park. However, ordinances do forbid public intoxication. No citations for fireworks ordinance violations were issued, but James said the department received 162 complaints between May 30 and July 5. He said officers explained ordinances to those shooting off fireworks outside the legal timeframe.

Complaints did increase by 60 this year, but James said he believes it’s related to rainy weather during the holiday.

For the mayor, it is the large number of nonresidents who travel to the city that is the greatest concern.
“This park was not created for those out of Mustang,” he said. “But for the people of Mustang.”

Landrith is shying away from his earlier suggestion of possibly adopting a permitting system, and now is uncertain about how to deal with the influx of people who don’t live in Mustang.

He said rows of headlights traveled down Mustang Road toward the interstate, and east and west on state Highway 152 after festivities were over on July 4.

“That just seems to tell me they weren’t from Mustang,” he said, adding it’s often obvious who’s from Mustang and who isn’t.

“Most people from Mustang were reserved, controlling their kids,” he said.

Landrith said he also received a number of calls about fireworks in residential neighborhoods. He said one of the biggest complaints was fireworks enthusiasts who wouldn’t let cars pass on the street, but kept shooting off fireworks instead.

Driving through some Mustang neighborhoods, Landrith said he was impressed that a large portion of the trash had been cleared.

“It was unreal,” he said.