Belknap County Democrats clean up areas in Laconia

LACONIA — A group of almost two dozen Belknap County Democrats took to the streets, trails, and rails of Laconia on Sunday, armed with trash bags and gloves, cleaning up some areas that had been the subject of citizen complaints on social media. The cleanup crew also included a group of people in recovery from New Life sober homes. The focus of the cleanup was the WOW Trail, that runs from Bartlett Beach to Lakeport, as that had been a primary site discussed online. Organizers of the project decided that a hands-on approach to the litter was the most constructive response to the problem.

Although a number of trash bags were filled by mid-afternoon, several of the participants expressed surprise that the problem was not worse. “After reading some of the Facebook posts, we were expecting a monumental task, but it turned out that the area seemed to have no more than a fairly typical amount of litter.” The stretch of trail and adjacent railroad track were scoured and cleaned by the group in a reasonable amount of time, and the participants all hope that users of the WOW trail will enjoy the cleaner conditions.