Those who have become accustomed to littering and illegal dumping may find themselves with a Warren County Constable knocking on their door.

Constable Junior Pennington is one of the constables looking to crack down on littering and illegal dumping. Sanitation Department director Josh Roberts recognized Pennington at the county’s Health and Welfare Committee meeting for all his hard work.

“I would like to give a big shout-out to Junior Pennington,” said Roberts. “He is a constable here in Warren County and he works closely with my office. Any time we have any trash dumped out on the roadway and the litter crew goes through and when they find a name, we contact Junior and he goes to their house, he talks with them and sometimes he writes them.”

He went on to say Pennington has really helped out the Sanitation Department and he is appreciated. Pennington told commissioners a little about how he is working to stop people from dumping their trash.

“We have gone out and warned people before and we took it one step further. I have a ticket book so I started going out and writing warning citations. I warn the people and leave them my number if they have any questions,” said Pennington.

The Morrison Convenience Center is a big target for illegal dumping when it is closed and that is what led Pennington to take action. In some cases, trash dumpers could be charged with a felony.

“This all came about from them dumping trash outside the Morrison site when it was closed,” said Pennington. “I wrote them all warning citations, and let them know that if it happened again we would be solving it in court. We have two different citations we can write. Littering and illegal dumping. Actually if there is enough trash we have got an aggravated dumping which can be a felony depending on how much trash is dumped.”

He told the committee about one instance when someone had thrown their trash out all along the road from the creek to the hill. They found out the person’s name and they went to his home. They told him he was either going to get a citation or he could come and pick it all back up. Pennington says he sat at the bottom of the hill with blue lights flashing while this man picked up all of his dumped trash. 

“There is going to have to be some deterrent,” said Pennington. 

Pennington is hoping this new method of handling littering and illegal dumping will prevent the trash dumping in the creeks and other popular areas.