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Every single-family home in Capitol Heights, Maryland received a new garbage bin last May. The incorporated town, having switched to a new trash pickup provider, had to swap out everyone’s trash cans.
But the old plastic bins—about 1,500 in total—didn’t go very far. Bright green and unwashed, the used trash cans ended up piled in an open-air storage facility owned by Capitol Heights. They joined a haphazard collection of vehicle parts, wood scraps and old mattresses.
Prince George’s County zoning maps list the property as residential. Under the county’s zoning ordinance, that should mean the space can’t serve as a “junkyard” or provide “outdoor storage” as a principal use.
It took the town a year to remove all the old bins from the lot: the last of the garbage cans, along with almost all the other junk, were taken out by May 16.
One homeowner watched all of this play out from her own front yard. The 26,000-square-foot lot directly abuts her property on Opus Avenue, separated by a chain-link fence. Tidy houses with neatly mown lawns line the rest of the suburban street, where almost all the residents are Black or Latino.
“To put a junkyard in a completely residential neighborhood is ridiculous,” Dana Torres*, 48, said. “It’s just disrespectful to the people that are here. But because most of us are over-consumed with working and surviving to keep ourselves afloat, we don’t have the time or the connections or the finances to fight this.”
Torres’ name has been changed because of concerns about how speaking out could affect her future job options if employers search online for her name.
A fourth-generation native Washingtonian, Torres moved to Capitol Heights a decade ago, seeking a peaceful place for her family that still had Metro access. She spent eight years driving for Uber, sometimes for up to 13 hours a day, while raising her son as a single mom.
“You invest in your home, not only because it’s an investment, but because this is where your heart is—this is where you want to leave a legacy for your family,” Torres said.
But Torres is still coping with serious, and increasingly expensive, rodent problems that started with the trash cans’ arrival at the storage lot. She can hear groundhogs scratching and squealing inside her home’s walls. Their burrows have cropped up all over her yard, right at the foundations of the house, causing water leaks in her basement when it rains. In 10 years living there, Torres said, she had never before had such acute issues.
In response to a request for an interview, Capitol Heights mayor Linda Monroe provided two written statements, in which she said that the town’s former trash services provider, Bates Trucking and Trash Removal, was supposed to take the bins away.
She explained that the town did not have the appropriate vehicles to efficiently deal with the garbage cans and had been “diligently removing wheels from each bin” before taking them away to “an approved dumping area.”
“It’s a tedious but steady process,” Monroe wrote in the email, sent a week before the final cans were removed. “I am truly empathetic of the residents’ plight and know that the intention of the Town is to eventually resolve this temporary situation.”
Taking It Up With the Town
After attempting to address the trash and rodent problems with officials at both the town and county levels, Torres said she felt “disheartened” by the process. The town had taken away some of the cans throughout the year, she said, but the pace of their removal picked up after the Informer first began asking about the storage lot in mid-April.
“Honestly… they would not have moved that stuff,” she said in a voice message to an Informer reporter May 16. “We’ve been complaining and complaining and complaining. So I’m so happy that it’s moved.”
Bates Trucking declined to comment on the situation with Capitol Heights, instead directing the Informer to speak with the company’s lawyer, Robert Dashiell. Dashiell said he believed the trash cans would still belong to Bates Trucking and did not know why the company had not taken them elsewhere.
In her statement, Monroe acknowledged that the town might sometimes “without intent, fall short.”
Monroe and other Capitol Heights officials declined to answer specific questions about what prompted the faster removals in April and May, as well as most questions about why the trash cans were put there in the first place, why another company was not contracted to remove them more quickly, and what plans the town has for the storage lot going forward.
Both Monroe and Capitol Heights council member Faith Ford directed further questions to Joy Ren, the town administrator.
Ren repeatedly declined to schedule an interview or provide written comments.
On one brief phone call to the administrator’s office, Dezirae Montgomery, a municipal employee in charge of permits and licensing, said the town was “actively working on making the appearance of the lot more appealing.” Both Montgomery and Monroe declined to talk further about future plans for the facility or any efforts by Capitol Heights to communicate with affected residents during the process.
Beyond Appearances: Persistent Problems
Torres has already spent around $1200 for wildlife control services to deal with the groundhogs around her home. The rodents had dug burrows all over her yard, including right around the edges of her house. Filling those holes with cement had little effect, since she couldn’t do much to address the rodents’ nearby source of food and habitat.
One of the tunnels runs right near an air conditioning unit, causing water to leak into the basement when it rains. She was told it will cost $13,000 to address the water damage and add new waterproofing measures.
Moreover, Torres uses the basement, which has its own entrance, as an Airbnb rental. Summers are her busiest time. Last year she could not rent the place out all season because of the scratching noises. Though the garbage bins are gone, it’s unclear whether she’ll be able to address the ongoing infestation and the water damage in time to rent it out this summer. Between last year and this upcoming summer, Torres estimates she will have lost around $20,000 of income she had earmarked for her son’s tuition at Montclair State University, where he is junior.
“He was also in an accelerated master’s program,” Torres said. “He’s going to need to come home and not finish that master’s there, but look for something more local where he can be at home.”
Ernest Buchanan, a neighbor who has lived across from the storage lot since 1978, said that while the spot has always looked bad, it used to be primarily used for storing vehicles, equipment and materials for fairly short periods of time. He said it’s gotten worse in “the last few years” as dumped items were left in the facility for longer.
Even before the garbage cans were placed there, residents like Buchanan had concerns about the storage lot and the surrounding land.
A neighbor on the Buchanans’ side of the street, 25-year-old Alex Gonzalez, said that in the three years since he moved in, he’s seen “dirty water” flowing down the street from the storage facility on many rainy days.
Juliana Evans, who lives a few doors over, has repeatedly had issues with work trucks and traffic cones blocking the road in front of the storage lot’s gate. Evans uses MetroAccess, a door-to-door paratransit service provided by WMATA for people with disabilities. But she said that on several occasions the MetroAccess vehicles couldn’t initially get to her door because the street was blocked.
In interviews, multiple Opus Avenue residents mentioned noise from trucks and from the work going on at the facility. During the week that the trash cans were being taken apart, Gonzalez described the sounds coming from the lot as a loud “noise like a grinder.” Several people also mentioned mosquitoes or flies that swarm around the lot when items stored inside collect standing water during the summer.
Not all residents along the street are concerned about the facility—Calvin Jakes, a neighbor who lives across the street and three houses down from the storage lot, said he “had no problems” with it. Those living in homes directly surrounding the site tended to report more issues.
Raul Cordova, a father of two who lives next door to Torres, said that he has had to deal with longstanding groundhog and raccoon problems on his property. The area behind his yard is forested, and according to county maps, a small part of that land belongs to Cordova. But next to his portion sits a long-abandoned house, and next to that is a parcel owned by Capitol Heights. All of it, Cordova said, attracts illegal dumping.
“I found out that part of the property is mine, which is why I have taken charge and started cleaning it, but the obstacle… is that people from around the area continue to throw garbage over and over again after I have already cleaned it,” Cordova wrote in a text exchange with the Informer, which has been translated from Spanish. “I have tried to contact the city of Capitol Heights and ask them to please take charge of cleaning up the rest of the property that is not mine, so the problem can be reduced a little. But I still have no response and no help of any kind.”
Capitol Heights officials did not respond to questions about whether the town employs any Spanish-speaking representatives that can help provide constituent services to Cordova or other members of the town’s fast-growing Latino population. In 2014, less than 5% of all Capitol Heights residents were Hispanic, according to census data. By 2021, the percentage had grown to nearly 13%.
More than 80% of the town’s population is Black. Torres said she sees the existence of the storage facility in her neighborhood as an “apparent” example of “environmental racism.”
“The thing that’s so disheartening is… our town is run by people of color, but I think we all [still] have experiences where we know our voices are never heard—they know that they can just do anything, and there are no repercussions,” Torres said. “If they were to put this in a white neighborhood, there would be backlash, and it would not even occur.”
This story is part 1 of a two-part series about the town of Capitol Heights’ handling of its storage facility on Opus Avenue.
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