re: LSU lakes master planning work kicks off Wednesday

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While others figure out who owns the property around University Lake, maintenance falls to volunteers
By Emily Lane, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

Parry "Matt" Thomas spends his retirement picking up other people's trash, trimming back overgrowth, sawing dead trees and donning waders to pull up plants that are smothering University Lake.

A row of white garbage cans -- cocked for trash-tossing -- near University Lake where May Street meets East Lakeshore Drive, wouldn't exist without Thomas and a posse of stewards he gathered together.

A volunteer group built and installed the cans after requesting design specs from BREC. The unsecured containers the volunteers previously placed there kept getting stolen or thrown in the lake, said Thomas, an advocate who started a nonprofit devoted to upkeep of the lakes system. The barrels, he said, are from Benny's Car Wash.

The company donated the used soap barrels, and Thomas, along with other volunteers, cut the tops off the containers. They then nailed them at an angle between two planks of wood before securing them to the ground. Except for the color, the trash cans match the green ones across the road, which BREC funded and installed around the perimeter of the adjacent City Park Lake -- an area where ownership and responsibility for maintenance is much clearer.

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