Crusade to rid Santa Maria St.
of litter brings honor to Bob Gainer

A resident of Rancho Santa Paula Mobile Home Park kicks butt — or rather litter — with his one-man crusade to defeat trash.

Robert “Bob” Gainer was lauded at the Monday City Council meeting for his quest to beautify the surrounding neighborhood, an effort so appreciated that numerous park residents — including his wife Melva — cheered him on from the audience.

Mayor John Procter presented the proclamation to Gainer, noting he has become a familiar sight to passersby on Santa Maria Street park that see Gainer making his clean up rounds on each side of the roadway.

It is a task he started nine years ago and during that time Procter said Gainer has “saved the city a substantial amount of money in street cleaning and other services and is doing his part on a daily basis in keeping Santa Paula clean and beautiful … because he just likes it without litter!”

Procter said he and the council as well as the community, “Want to thank you so much for what you do.”

Gainer said the effort initially was an organized group effort: “We got together and did it on a Saturday and it was a major project because there was a lot of litter … and after that I just decided to keep doing it myself.”

Gainer spends time “probably three times a week, spends a couple of hours out there,” an effort he said has other benefits.

“It keeps me out of my wife’s way which,” he noted, “is a good thing!”

Procter asked for a show of hands from those in the audience that were present in support of Gainer and the room was filled with applause.

“A lot of nice people live in that Rancho Santa Paula,” Gainer told Procter, “and they voted for you!”

In a later interview Gainer, a Santa Paula resident since 2001, said, “I like the results,” of his work, as “I like to see a clean street.

“It’s really hard to keep it clean, I kid you not,” he said of the thoroughfare he grooms from Palm Avenue to the Highway 126 pedestrian over-crossing to the east, about ? mile. 

“That’s as far as I can handle,” on his now easier to ride three-wheel bicycle, from which he uses a ceiling bulb pole changer with a 10-foot length to joust with trash before he deposits it in a bag for later disposal.

So adept is Gainer there is nothing he can’t retrieve, even from the other side of the chain link fence that separates Santa Maria Street from Highway 126, but he refuses to pick up cigarette or cigar butts.

Gainer believes some of the trash “blows in from passing pickups and trucks,” where it is unsecured, but “quite a bit of it is just litter, people just toss it out when they’re walking or driving through.”

But, even litterbugs hold on to aluminum cans, “People apparently don’t throw them out,” but rather turn them in for recycling.

And, speaking of money, Gainer once found a $20 bill, a few times has comes across a dollar here and there, a few pennies here and there, “But nothing of value.”