On a chilly April 21 morning, a throng of helpers showed up to patrol Catasauqua’s streets looking for trash and graffiti.

“It’s the graffiti that got me out here,” resident Sherri Anderson said. “We have too much of it.”

The cleanup has been going on for years, but this is the largest turnout so far. It might be that Blocker’s Coffeehouse provided an early boost of caffeine to the volunteers.

In addition to Anderson, the enthusiastic cast included Christine Weaver, Kim Race, Josh Sell, Ed Hauser, Joni Elekes, Stephen Anderson, Charles Anderson, James Sagl, Deb Mellish, Bob Nolter and Kim Brubaker. A few others joined the effort later.

The new ground rule for graffiti is to identify where it is, take a picture and send the location to CatasauquaMainStreets@gmail.com.

Action is being taken. The county has a program to get graffiti off bridges. The post office has been alerted that almost every mailbox is tagged, and Main Streets is working with the borough to determine a plan for getting rid of the graffiti.

“The problem is that the victim is responsible for cleaning up the graffiti. It is an added nuisance for residents,” Brubaker said.

Saturday’s plan was to identify graffiti and then post it to Main Streets.

“It’s going to be too much for us to clean up graffiti today,” she said.

Weaver is working with the borough to get graffiti identified. Part of her plan is to use the proposed Quick Ticket plan to get it removed.

“The county has been working on the problem for a long while, but they have a very low rate of catching troublemakers,” she said.

Trash in the streets is still a big issue. Street sweeping was scheduled for April 23. Most in the group said street sweeping needs to be done more often.

A casual observation shows most people keep the area around their business or residence pretty clean. Public areas, however, are troublesome. Lot of trash was picked up on the old Fireman’s Field.

“In places like Bethlehem, where I moved from, they have a lot of money,” resident Barbara Santiago said. “In Catasauqua, the residents need to get together to get this cleaned up.”