Los Angeles Hauled 13 Million Pounds of Trash and Human Waste Out of One Park in 2025. A Week After the Mayor’s Cleanup Event, It Was Filthy Again.
Public records obtained by RedState and corroborated by the New York Post show Los Angeles city crews removed roughly 13 million pounds of trash and hazardous waste from MacArthur Park in 2025 alone — 12.7 million pounds of general solid waste, plus 142,329 pounds of human waste counted separately. LA Sanitation ran the haul-away under its CARE+ program, logging more than 7,100 individual cleanup events at the park last year, a pace of roughly twenty a day, in a park Mayor Karen Bass (D) and Council Member Eunisses Hernandez (D) have spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to keep clean.
This is a different story than the one that made national headlines in May 2026, when more than 300 federal agents raided the same park and seized roughly 40 pounds of fentanyl. That operation was about drug-trafficking enforcement. This one is about sanitation — the unglamorous, expensive, and so far unwinnable job of just keeping the park’s ground physically clean, regardless of who gets arrested.
Even as the tonnage hit a record high, the citywide cleanup budget was cut. And when a local paper asked City Hall what cleaning up this one park actually cost, the mayor’s office and Hernandez’s office both declined to say.
- 13 million lbs — trash and hazardous waste hauled from MacArthur Park by LA Sanitation crews in 2025 alone — 12.7 million lbs of general solid waste plus 142,329 lbs of human waste specifically — RedState, NY Post
- 7,100+ — individual CARE+ cleanup events LA Sanitation logged at the park in 2025, citing city records — RedState, NY Post
- $56M → $35M — the citywide CARE+ cleanup program's budget, cut year-over-year even as this park's tonnage hit a record high — Santa Monica Daily Press
- $27 million — self-reported "care-first" investment Council Member Eunisses Hernandez's office says it directed to the park since 2023 — a separate dataset from the tonnage figures above — CalMatters
- 1 week — how long a high-profile February 2026 cleanup event lasted before a follow-up visit found the park "filled again with trash, encampment debris and drug waste" — TheLALocal
The 13-million-pound figure comes from a public-records request detailed by RedState’s Bob Hoge on July 19, 2026, and corroborated by New York Post coverage syndicated the same day. It breaks into two categories: 12.7 million pounds of general solid waste — furniture, food packaging, tents, discarded clothing, construction debris — and 142,329 pounds counted specifically as human waste. Both figures cover calendar year 2025 alone, at a single 35-acre park a few blocks west of downtown Los Angeles.
LA Sanitation (LASAN) ran the removal through its CARE+ program — Comprehensive Cleaning and Rapid Engagement — logging more than 7,100 individual cleanup events at MacArthur Park in 2025 alone. Spread across the year, that is close to twenty separate cleanup dispatches a day, seven days a week, at one park, in one City Council district. It is not a single annual haul; it is a maintenance operation running at a scale usually associated with disaster response, not routine park upkeep.
That volume sits alongside, but is separate from, the federal drug enforcement action that drew national attention two months earlier: on May 6, 2026, more than 300 federal and local officers raided the park and seized roughly 40 pounds of fentanyl in a related operation. That case was about the 18th Street gang’s alleged open-air drug market. The tonnage numbers here describe a parallel and ongoing problem — keeping the physical park clean — that predates that raid and has continued after it.
“Hazardous waste” in the LASAN data is not a euphemism. It covers syringes and needles, flammable materials, corrosive chemicals, petroleum products, mold, blood, human waste, rodent infestation, dead animals recovered from the park’s lake, and bedbug-infested furniture. Removing it requires sanitation crews to wear OSHA-level protective gear — the kind of equipment ordinarily reserved for industrial hazmat sites, not a municipal park with a lake, a band shell, and a recreation center.
A separate program works the same physical footprint from the county side. LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis (D), 1st District, co-led a coordinated city-county operation at the park on May 14, 2025 — the 51st run of the county’s Pathway Home encampment-resolution program — that moved 69 people into interim housing. Where CARE+ targets waste, Pathway Home targets people; one is a city sanitation function, the other a county-city housing operation, and both report their own separate metrics of success at the same park.
A bus stop bench in MacArthur Park was removed after complaints about homeless people sleeping there and nearby drug use.
Council Member Eunisses Hernandez, whose District 1 covers the park, keeps her own tally. Her office says it has directed $27 million in “care-first” investments to the park and surrounding area since 2023, and separately self-reports removing more than 36,000 pieces of hazardous waste and distributing more than 17,000 doses of Narcan — figures confirmed via CalMatters commentary. That is a self-reported dataset from a council office, distinct from the independently obtained CARE+ tonnage figures in Section 01. The two numbers describe different things over different windows of time; neither confirms nor contradicts the other, and they should not be added together.
What is harder to square is the budget line behind all of it. The Santa Monica Daily Press reported that the citywide CARE+ program’s budget was cut from $56 million in fiscal year 2024-25 to $35 million in fiscal year 2025-26 — a nearly 40 percent reduction, arriving in the same year MacArthur Park’s own cleanup tonnage hit a record high. The same article put a direct question to City Hall: what did cleaning up MacArthur Park, specifically, actually cost? Neither Hernandez’s office nor the mayor’s office responded.
Spencer Pratt blasts LA's $40M MacArthur Park plan - 'clean up the Fentanyl zombies first'
That $40 million figure is a separate line item — a park redevelopment and beautification plan, not the same pool of money as Hernandez’s $27 million “care-first” total or the CARE+ program budget. Three different dollar figures, three different purposes, and City Hall has not published a single accounting that ties them together or states what this one park has cost taxpayers in total.
MacArthur Park has failed a cleanup before. In October 2021, then-Councilman Gil Cedillo closed the park entirely for a $1.5 million renovation; it reopened in early 2022, and the same conditions returned. The current push began in January 2025, with informal fencing to block illegal vending and a new LAPD enforcement deployment, and escalated on October 16, 2025, when the LA Recreation and Parks Commission approved a $2.3 million permanent perimeter fence.
“Filled again with trash, encampment debris and drug waste.”
Condition of MacArthur Park, per a follow-up visit one week after the Feb. 28–Mar. 1, 2026 “Shine LA” cleanup — TheLALocal
The most recent high-profile effort was the “Love My Community” / Shine LA cleanup event on February 28–March 1, 2026, with Mayor Bass, Council Member Hernandez, and volunteers photographed clearing debris across the weekend. A follow-up visit on March 8 — one week later — found the park filled again with trash, encampment debris, and drug waste, undoing days of volunteer labor almost as fast as it had been completed. LASAN itself changed leadership soon after: the City Council confirmed Joone Kim-Lopez as executive director on June 30, 2026, succeeding Enrique Zaldivar, who ran the department through the full 2025 cleanup year the 13-million-pound figure covers.
The pattern is not unique to one park. An Oxi Fresh survey ranked the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area the second-dirtiest in the country, and a separate Lawnstarter study ranked Los Angeles the second-dirtiest city outright. MacArthur Park’s tonnage is a concentrated, documented instance of a citywide reputation, not an isolated anomaly.
The cost is not only civic. Langer’s Deli, the Wilshire Boulevard institution across the street from the park that has employed union staff since 1947, publicly weighed closing in August 2024, with owner Norm Langer citing conditions in and around the park. As of the most recent reporting, it remains uncertain whether the business survives — a single, named, 40-job casualty of a problem no city budget line has yet solved.
Mayor Karen Bass (D) — led the Feb. 2026 “Shine LA” cleanup event; her office did not respond when asked the direct cost of cleaning MacArthur Park.
Council Member Eunisses Hernandez (D-CD1) — represents the park; self-reports $27 million in “care-first” investment since 2023, separate from the independently obtained CARE+ tonnage data.
Supervisor Hilda Solis (D) — LA County, 1st District; co-led the county’s May 2025 Pathway Home operation at the park.
Joone Kim-Lopez — confirmed LASAN executive director, June 30, 2026, succeeding Enrique Zaldivar, who ran the department through the 2025 cleanup year.
LA Sanitation removed 13 million pounds of trash and hazardous waste from one park in a single year, running more than 7,100 cleanup events to do it — while the citywide budget for that exact program was cut nearly 40 percent. Council Member Hernandez points to $27 million in self-reported investment; nobody in City Hall will say what this one park actually cost. And the clearest evidence the problem isn’t solved isn’t a number at all: a week after the mayor’s own cleanup event, the park was filthy again.
