Newton woman shows city council the litter left behind by PGI convention

Glenda Duffus, of Newton, brought a bag filled with fireworks debris and shell casings to the city council meeting on Oct. 3 to show elected officials the amount of litter she had cleaned up from the Pyrotechnics Guild International Convention held at the Iowa Speedway a new months ago.

With a residence in the 2000 block of East 12th Street South, Duffus was about a mile away from the action. The week-long convention was mostly closed off to PGI members, with only three days of public nights to allow visitors to enjoy live music concerts and fireworks displays like none they had ever seen before.

However, Duffus was dismayed by the amount of debris that was generated from each day’s events. She described the fireworks displays as “small bombs going off all hours of the day and night.” The roads, she said, were littered with chunks of industrial cardboard and large plastic domes.

Duffus sent an email to council members and the mayor in mid-September regarding the convention and “all the debris that remained” after PGI left town.

“It was very gratifying to receive a response from one council member, Evelyn George. She even drove out to look at the area and collected her own bag of debris,” Duffus said. “How do I know about this? Rusty Wallace (Drive) is my daily walking route. I walk all the way over to the headquarters building.”

On her daily walks after the convention, Duffus picked up bags of debris for an entire month. That is when she decided to write a letter to each council member. So much debris still remains, she claimed, but the grass and ragweed have grown too tall for her to sift through or for passersby to see plainly.

“But just across from the track there’s kind of a, I call it a little circle drive where there used to be a house. You walk in there and you just see all kinds of debris that’s still there and not biodegradable,” Duffus said before reaching into her bag. “…These are pieces of the plastic that I picked up. Big pieces of stuff like this.”

Duffus said the bag of debris she brought was collected last week in a couple of minutes. Seeing the debris, she said, is a bad reflection on the town and the area around the town. And it “shows a lack of respect” for the racetrack, the areas around it and the surrounding neighborhood.

Although she was empathetic to the event and its organizers because it was the first time a PGI Convention was ever hosted in Newton, Duffus said a lot could be learned the unknowns. When the city gives money to invite such a group, there should be signed agreements in place that address the cleanup.

“I think a city has a responsibility to follow up with that,” Duffus said. “The Newton citizens are due that much respect.”

Council member Randy Ervin was pivotal in organizing the PGI convention, and even he agreed Duffus had some legitimate points. Ervin told Newton News that agreements were in place to clean up the racetrack, but he argued many of the pyrotechnics debris left behind is biodegradable.

But Ervin also made a mental note for the next Newton convention to organize more extensive cleanup opportunities. For instance, he would like the committee to recruit the Boy Scouts or other community service groups to assist the cleanup, particularly in the areas where Duffus mentioned.

“Probably when it’s all said and done on that Saturday, have them, with garbage bags, go and walk that ditch. Because I do think it was not as clean as I had hoped even when they left,” Ervin said. “Same with the track. We ended up spending some money renting a street sweeper to go out and clean the track.”

Ervin is glad Duffus brought the issue to the council so that it can be addressed. The committee, he added, had already put some things in place so the next time PGI comes to town they can leave the place a little better than they did this past year. Organizing the event was a learning experience for all.

“None of us have ever held this thing so we learned a lot,” he said. “And some things we can fix. Now the people that are complaining about the noise if we host it again, we can’t do much about the noise. We either want the noise and the convention or we don’t want the convention.”

A month ago, the PGI Board of Directors announced Newton was one of the two choices of towns to host the next convention. The board eventually announced on Sept. 19 that Appleton, Wisc., would be the next host city for the 2023 convention. It will take place at the Wisconsin International Raceway.

Ervin is still pushing for Newton to host the 2024 event. In addition to bringing entertainment to the community during public nights, the convention proved to be a huge economic driver. Ervin said he still gets comments from business owners who tell him how many customers and sales they had during the convention.

Contact Christopher Braunschweig at 641-792-3121 ext 560 or at cbraunschweig@newtondailynews.com