For Pete's sake clean up your own mess

Cleanliness is next to Godliness — unless it’s in downtown Bremerton, where it’s next to impossible.

Downtown Bremerton is a mess. The alleys are lined with trash and the streets are littered with discarded food wrappers. And the cigarette butts are everywhere — in the alleys, in piles on sidewalks.

The frustrating thing about it is that on any given morning, most store owners are outside, broom in hand, trying to get their sections of sidewalk presentable for the day ahead. By the end of the day, litterbugs have crept out of the sidewalk crevices and left their trash everywhere.

For Pete’s sake, people, clean up after yourselves!

For a city on the move, for a city that is trying to attract people and businesses downtown, it is absolutely disgraceful. It tells residents and visitors alike that we have no respect in our community.

Is that the message we like to send?

The city is dumping millions of dollars to spruce the place up and has even given the project a beautiful name: Bremerton Harborview.

Ahh, Bremerton Harborview. The name provokes visions of sparkling, beautiful water and snow-capped peaks. It sounds like a place that would make people want to get out of their cars, get out and stretch their legs and spend some time relaxing, hanging out with their dear friends and dropping cash at every shop along the way.

If, by some miracle, the buildings were to sprout out of the ground over night and the city were to host its first conference — with hundreds of people who have money burning their pockets — the visitors would take a quick look around, see tons of cigarette butts and empty beer bottles, and leave.

And take their money with them.

And we certainly don’t want that to happen.

We want people to come here, feel welcome and be impressed by the the goods and services the city offers. We want them to be impressed by how clean and wonderful our city is.

The only way visitors will be impressed with how clean the city is will be if the city is actually clean.

Elementary, my dear Bremertonians.

Our alley ways could be lined with gold for all we know but because there is so much trash in them, we can’t see the ground.

For Pete’s sake, people, clean up after yourselves.

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