Spring is here. Our landscape is coming alive. Let's work together to get litter out of nature's way.

I invite Floyd County residents to volunteer to pick up litter during the PRIDE Spring Cleanup, April 7-21. This will be an old-fashioned spring cleaning for Floyd County's roads, streams and hillsides.

You can help by volunteering for cleanup events already scheduled by your local PRIDE Coordinators. For a list of cleanup events near you, visit www.kypride.org. Or, call your local PRIDE Coordinators: Brent Graden in Prestonsburg at 886-2335 or Tommy Robinson in Wayland at 358-2316.

If the road or stream you want to clean is not on the Spring Cleanup schedule, then call your PRIDE Coordinator to plan your own cleanup event. If you recruit your friends and neighbors to volunteer, then your coordinator will provide the trash bags and arrange for pick up of the trash you collect. Free T-shirts will be given to PRIDE Spring Cleanup volunteers, while supplies last.

You can make a difference by volunteering. Just look at what Floyd County officials, residents and students have accomplished together since PRIDE began in 1997:

2,917 volunteers have worked 9,355 hours.

6,139 bags of trash have been collected.

1,587 junk appliances and 414 tons of scrap metal have been recycled.

61,244 old tires have been recovered.

This is the 10th anniversary of PRIDE, and I encourage you to join in a decade of difference ... volunteer!

Richard Thomas

Executive Director

Eastern Kentucky PRIDE

Somerset