Usually you can’t tell who dumps trash illegally in the woods by the Westville Manor projects. Last week some teens found a load with an out-of-town company’s name all over it — and details about people’s homes in towns far away.
Fourteen-year-old Andre Cowles lives with his mom in Westville Manor, a public-housing development in the shadow of West Rock. On Thursday afternoon, he was walking with two of this friends when they spotted boxes of papers strewn through the woods just off of Wayfarer Street. The trash turned out to be pages and pages of documents from Statewide Appraisal Services, a real estate appraisal company based in Ansonia.
Curious and disturbed by the trash, Andre walked up the street to get assistance from Solar Youth. The youth development and environmental organization has its headquarters in Westville Manor.
Joanne Sciulli, executive director at Solar Youth, helped Andre and his friends clean up the papers and stack the boxes by the side of the road.
Altogether, Andre and his friends had discovered about ten boxes’ worth of appraisal order forms and appraisal reports for residential properties all over Connecticut. The documents covered a broad time period, from the 1990s all they way up to 2006.
It wasn’t the first time Andre had seen trash dumped in the woods in his neighborhood, and he wasn’t too happy about it. Click the play arrow above to watch Andre explain what happened and how he felt, in a video made by Sciulli.
“They feel like they can toss this stuff here just cause it’s the ghetto,” Cowles said on Saturday. “They think they can just do whatever they want.”
Sciulli said she has seen trash dumped in the woods for the last 13 years, since she first moved her organization into the neighborhood. “People do it all the time,” she said. “Usually it’s construction waste,” like roofing shingles, which can’t be traced.
Dumpers just assume no one in the neighborhood is going to care, said Sciulli.
Often they’re right. Sciulli said that people in Westville Manor are so accustomed to it that they often don’t speak up.
Andre and his neighbors “have every right to live in a community that feels good, that looks good,” Sciulli said.
Investigation
When they found the documents on Thursday, Sciulli and Andre looked up Statewide Appraisal Services on the internet. They tried to call the company, but the phone number on Statewide’s website didn’t work.
On Friday morning, the New Haven Independent located the correct phone number and contacted Tony Mavuli, the president of Statewide Appraisal. Mavuli said that he had “no idea” how his company’s documents ended up in the woods off Wayfarer Street. “We had everything pretty much shredded” when they moved from West Haven to Ansonia in 2006, Mavuli said.
Mavuli did acknowledge that he “might’ve mistakenly left behind” some boxes in the basement or the attic of his old offices in West Haven, a building that he still owns.
“I didn’t dump them,” Mavuli said. “I’m sorry somebody did it. I’m not the one who dumped there.”
Asked if the documents are confidential, Mavuli said, “No not really. It’s all public record.”
Later on Friday, Mavuli called to say that he had picked up the boxes off of Wayfarer Street. He said that he was trying to find out who was responsible. He said he suspects that his tenant in West Haven found the boxes in the basement and dumped them in West Rock.
Told that Mavuli had cleaned up the trash, Andre said, “I feel that’s OK. I hope they don’t do it again.”
Police?
“Something like that we would definitely get the police involved in,” said Department of Public Works Chief of Operations Jeff Pescosolido, when informed about the dumping.
But police spokesperson Officer Joe Avery said that it’s difficult to prosecute illegal dumping without an eyewitness. “If nobody saw them do it, there’s not a lot we can do about it.” Avery said that even if the trash has somebody’s name all over it, it’s easy to deny responsibility for dumping.