NATCHEZ — Spring is in the air — flowers are blooming, birds and bees are flying and the litterbugs are multiplying.

Adams County Sheriff’s Office Maj. Charles Harrigill, who serves as the county’s litter control officer, said in the month of May alone litter crews picked up 266 bags of trash on highways and 470 bags of trash on county roads.

“Consistently every year in Adams County, we win the award for picking up the most trash on the side of the highway,” he said. “That is a dubious honor.”

When Harrigill updated the members of the supervisors about the problem, Supervisor Mike Lazarus said he believed with so much trash activity the county would catch some offenders.

“It seems like our justice court judges could assign us some people to pick up trash,” Lazarus said, suggesting judges could give people convicted in justice court the option of paying fines or working off the penalty on a litter crew.

Harrigill said he has also identified 28 major dumpsites in Adams County this year, a higher number than last year in part because the cleanup crews found them before the sites were covered up with kudzu. Many of the illegal dumping spots are on county rights-of-way, but many are also in private land.

Adams County Board of Supervisors President Darryl Grennell said it doesn’t make good sense for people to go to bayous and dump in them.

“People say, ‘This is my bayou and I am going to dump in them,’” Grennell said. “But you can’t do that without a permit, and if the Department of Environmental Quality finds out you did that, they can make you dig them out and take it all to a sanitary landfill. It contaminates water systems.”

Dumping in a hole and filling over it can also cause contamination problems or lead to sinkholes in the future as the buried waste breaks down, Grennell said.

If residents need to dump waste that can’t be picked up by sanitation services, the county has two convenience stations for waste drop-off, County Administrator Joe Murray said.

“Convenience stations are not something that are state-wide, it is something Adams County has provided for their people,” Murray said.

The convenience stations are at the intersection of Steamplant and Foster Mound roads and on Upper Kingston Road near the former Kingston school.

Murray said county residents can also drop off solid waste at the county’s contracted landfill, Riverbend Environmental Services, if they can demonstrate with their ID they are Adams County residents.