Sports Teams Earn Money by Tidying Up the Hazlet Train Station Lots

In Hazlet, youth sports teams are able to earn money for their organizations by volunteering to clean up litter left behind at the NJ Transit station, located between Holmdel Road and Hazlet Avenue.

Because Hazlet Township owns one of the two parking lots, and NJ Transit owns the other, the Public Works Dept. is responsible for keeping the grounds clean. But for 20 years, the DPW has encouraged youth organizations to lend a hand, and paid them back with contributions from the township's New Jersey Clean Communities grant. In 2011, Hazlet received $30,000 from the state program.

At 8 a.m. on Saturday, Hazlet United Soccer Association's U-7 Mustangs girls team was one of several organizations to punch in. They brought 42 people to the station clean-up. In a few weeks, after paperwork is filed and approved by township approval, the team will receive $420 for their effort. (The pay is $5 and hour per person, for two hours work, but it usually can be accomplished in one hour.)

The girls' families signed their names on clipboards, lined up for long picks, garbage bags and gloves from the public works truck, and started swarming the lot collecting cigarette butts, bottle caps, plastic soda bottles, gum wrappers, coffee cups and anything else that did not belong. They are not permitted on the platform or near the tracks; that area is cleaned by NJ Transit.

"It's an easy way to fund-raise," said Mustangs Coach Ronnie Juntunen. Opportunities like these build team unity, added his wife, Tory. "And the girls are getting the experience of doing community service," she said.

Hazlet Township DPW's Ed Zimmerman oversees the Clean Communities Saturdays with two employees. They are usually scheduled three to four times in the fall, and again in the spring. He distributes the equipment from the back of his truck, all purchased with the grant money. 

"One of the lessons the kids learn is there are consequences to throwing something on the ground. Someone's got to pick it up," Zimmerman said. But he acknowledged, wryly, that in this case it is probably not children leaving the litter in the station.

Sometimes the crews discover the woods along the perimeter have been illegally used as a large-item dropoff site. But mostly the bags get filled with pesky small paper pickup. The hardest thing to pick up is the disintigrating cigarette filter that remain from a tossed cigarette. The white blobs are everywhere. They are mushy and is maddening for the kids to pick up with the big work gloves or pointy picks.

On occasion someone will find a quarter, or even a dollar, on the ground. Once in a rare while a wallet is discovered and turned in to the police, Zimmerman said.

Up on the platform, train ticket-holders watched the young people with admiration. Pediatrician Asha Jain of Holmdel, headed to New York with her husband to see her new twin grandchildren, said she was impressed by the concept. "It's good! It is teaching them responsibility," she said.

Commuter John Hallen of Keansburg, on his way to his job in New York as an MTA subway engineer, said he knows all too well that commuters can be thoughtless about leaving their trash behind.

He said he's seen the Hazlet kids doing the work on past Saturday mornings. "I think they do a fine job," he said.  "I want to say to them, 'Thank you.'"