Why was Austin neighborhood a city dumping ground for years? KXAN investigates

KXAN visited the site multiple times in January. At one point the mound of dirt, leaves and trash on the street formerly called Dragonfly Court was piled about eight feet high and 20 feet across. Street sweepers and dump trucks lined up each morning, waiting to unload their waste.

AUSTIN (KXAN) – Carol Orton can almost hear the bustle her southeast Austin neighborhood once had.

“Where else can you, in one evening, have rap music and a barbecue on one side? And a piñata and Mexicana music on the other side?” Orton said. The best part was “sitting in your back porch. It was listening to the sounds of a neighborhood.”

Carol Orton and the pile of street sweeper trash that used to be in her cul-de-sac. (KXAN Photo Illustration/Richie Bowes and Wendy Gonzalez)

Those sounds are long gone. They were swept away, in effect, by Onion Creek floodwaters that inundated the area. Flooding prompted a two-decade buyout program in which the city purchased homes and removed them to take people and property out of harm's way.

Orton, now 78, looks out on a neighborhood that has changed dramatically.

She and the other handful of residents who never took a buyout watched as year after year passed, neighbor after neighbor packed up and moved, and home after home was demolished.

Then the city of Austin began its dumping.

Orton estimated it was about five years ago when city trucks started using a vacant cul-de-sac just yards from her back fence as a dumping ground. Without asking, Austin Resource Recovery decided their neighborhood would be a spot for street sweepers from across the city to pile waste, Orton said. Dump trucks later haul the waste off to a landfill in Creedmoor.

Carol Orton speaks with KXAN investigator Kelly Wiley on the back porch of Orton's southeast Austin home. Orton is one of the few residents left who didn't take a city buyout option. (KXAN Photo/David Barer)

KXAN visited the site multiple times in January. At one point, the mound of dirt, leaves and trash on the street formerly called Dragonfly Court was piled about eight feet high and 20 feet across. Street sweepers and dump trucks lined up each morning, waiting to unload their waste. One by one, the clattering trucks opened their cargo beds, reversed into the cul-de-sac, sped backward toward the pile and stopped suddenly to eject as much waste as possible. Garbage juice dripped onto the pavement and down the street. Clouds of dust swirled up from dump trucks as they released, pushed and lifted waste from the pile.

The steady beeping of industrial rigs was clearly audible from Orton’s back porch when she spoke with KXAN in January. Orton lives alone and stays home much of the time. The noise doesn’t concern her, she said, and her dogs didn’t seem to mind, either.

“The dogs used to go, and they'd bring home rib bones, pizza slices, but that's what dogs do,” Orton said, with a wry smile.

Others felt differently.

The cul-de-sac once know as Dragonfly Court became a dumping ground for years, when the city designated it as a transfer point for street sweepers to leave their waste. (KXAN Photo/Richie Bowes)

“City of Austin has decided to use our neighborhood as a dump … dozens of trucks drive by here every day,” said an Austin 311 complaint from December 2022. “It’s a complete mess, roads are dirty and some of the drivers pass by real fast. Please help.”

Another complaint from January 2023 describes a “health issue for the neighborhood nearby, about 20 (to) 30 street sweepers come in every day to dispose of their dirt and trash … trash all over the place … dust particles blow everywhere from their trash pile… every day.”

Austin Resource Recovery told KXAN the Onion Creek location is a “temporary staging site” for trash to be left and later picked up. Rather than having each street sweeper drive an extra 8 miles to the Creedmoor landfill, the city would save time and energy by piling waste in the neighborhood. The department said the site was approved and dumping was ongoing for years.

But KXAN’s investigation found not all the department’s rules were followed.

Down the drain

KXAN shot video of a street sweeper operator parked down the street, using a hose connected to a hydrant, spraying their truck holds and blowing waste straight into storm drains. Later, the city acknowledged, that should not have happened.

“We have reviewed the video provided by KXAN and are concerned about what we saw. Operators are not allowed to wash vehicles in the street,” Austin Resource Recovery said in a statement.

Orton said she wasn’t notified the dumping would begin on the other side of her fence, or asked if she was OK with the location. She was told, around the time the dumping began, that the city would remove the dirt pile completely each day, she said.

That hasn’t happened for a long time, she said. KXAN found the trash pile building in size over multiple days before removal in January.

Amy Slagle, a division manager with Resource Recovery, confirmed the city’s plan was to remove the waste “every day.”

After KXAN began asking questions, Resource Recovery halted all dumping in the neighborhood and cleaned the site. The department also stopped using a similar site behind a strip mall in north Austin on Great Northern Boulevard. A third site on Bolm Road is still being used.

Resource Recovery also said two of five complaints about the dump on Dragonfly Court that were submitted to 311 were routed to the wrong department.

A spokesperson for 311 said it reviewed each of the five service requests, and all them were handled according to its procedures.

Slagle said Resource Recovery fills an important role and wants to be respectful of residents.

“We want to be good neighbors, and we're working to keep the community clean with our operation,” Slagle said. Her department’s road crews clean over 60,000 miles of road per year, collecting almost 5,000 tons of trash and debris in the process, according to the city.

‘Very alarming’

Austin City Council Member Vanessa Fuentes said she knows Austin Resource Recovery employees are “hardworking and do a lot for the city.” Nevertheless, she said, the department’s decision to dump in the neighborhood and the failure to follow procedures were “very alarming.”

“I often think about the ways that systemic biases show up,” Fuentes said. “When you have this type of procedure happening in areas that are predominately Latino, an area that has already suffered catastrophic flooding events, where there's been loss of life and displacement of communities – for me, it was alarming.”

Fuentes said she wants the city to embody a phrase her community uses: “no decision about us without us.”

After KXAN brought its findings to Fuentes, her office followed up with Resource Recovery.

“They have assured us that it is no longer happening in this area, and we expect to hold them to it,” she said.  

In light of KXAN’s findings, Resource Recovery also said it would revisit its procedures for selecting and using “temporary staging sites” for waste.

For Orton, the change in the neighborhood is palpable.

After years of daily truck traffic behind her back fence, something unusual happened within weeks of our investigative team first knocking on her door. On a recent evening, four big trucks showed up. Orton said she could see their lights shining over the top of her fence line.

She could hear crashing and banging and slamming. Orton had a feeling, after years of noise, she was finally hearing the finale.

“I knew the trash was gonna be gone in the morning. Hallelujah — it was,” Orton told KXAN in February.

And that was the end of the dump.

“It's nice to know, even though there's only three or four of us left here in this beautiful neighborhood, that somebody cares.”

Investigative Photojournalist Richie Bowes, Graphic Artist Wendy Gonzalez, Director of Investigations & Innovation Josh Hinkle, Social Media Producer Jaclyn Ramkissoon, Graphic Artist Christina Staggs, and Digital Director Kate Winkle contributed to this report.