Letter to the Editor: Trespassing, Dumping Are Signs of Bigger Issues

The letter to the Pulse regarding Main Street Market’s attempts to reserve its parking lot for its customers is an indication of a condition spreading across the county. 

Another indicator is the need to, in essence, post a guard at the Baileys Harbor Green Site as a result of indiscriminate dumping of garbage in the recycling bins. 

Another example was a pile of garbage on the beach of the Baileys Harbor Boreal Forest Jonathan Ela Unit. Next to it was a small sign saying: “Thanks to the party on Sat. 8/29! Hope you enjoyed this beautiful beach ☹!” The sign was apparently left by the person who went to the trouble of collecting the garbage into a pile after the party had moved on.

I think that we can’t ignore the fact that such incidents are not isolated and coincidental. No, these are truly indicators of the current direction of our county, and I’m sure that Pulse readers could add many more such examples. The Main Street Market letter is a particularly good example because it provides actual rationalizations for bad behaviors made by people who were essentially trespassers.

Now, we all know that tourism is an essential element of the Door County economy – the more tourists that we get, the better the economy – but we can’t ignore the costs of this equation. It would be unfair to blame the downward slide of the county totally on tourists, but the preceding examples clearly indicate that the perpetrators of the cited events – whether tourists or locals – cannot be shamed or peer-pressured into decent and lawful behaviors. 

Our choice then is either to just sit back and watch the degradation of our county, or to suck it up and hire more people to hand out citations for violations because clearly just putting up signs is basically a big waste of time and money.

Mark Polczynski

Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin