December 6, 2022
By: Dwayne Page
Good citizens doing a good deed!
Eddie Ramos and Tara Hunt, operators of Kayaking Adventures of Tennessee were in town Saturday for the Smithville Christmas Parade. The next day they took it upon themselves to help clean up streets in the downtown square area from the leftover candy and debris.
The effort was part of the couple’s KAT Challenge urging communities to keep waterways clean.
Ramos and Hunt were at the city council meeting Monday night where Mayor Josh Miller and the aldermen thanked and applauded them for their work in bagging the garbage for city workers to easily pickup Monday morning.
Kayaking Adventures of Tennessee offers guided kayak trips to Burgess Falls in Sparta.
From that guides tours experience Ramos and Hunt came up with the idea for a KAT Challenge giving participants on the trips the option to carry along a bag provided by KAT to pick up as much trash as possible. The person who collects the most on the trip gets a shiny new KAT Challenge Button and their picture on the KAT website and on the KAT Challenge Page. All who participate also get a special shout-out on the KAT FB and Instagram pages for being protectors of our beautiful Tennessee waterways.
During Monday night’s meeting, Hunt said another KAT challenge is made during the fall and winter season.
“Right now we have the KAT Trash Challenge going on and what we are asking people to do is wherever they are in the United States, if they are in their towns, out hiking, or even paddling in the water to clean up all the trash they see around, bag it up, take a picture of it, post it to our social media and we will recognize them for their good work,” said Hunt.
Ramos said the downtown cleanup effort was not something he and Tara had planned.
“We didn’t know we were going to clean up the public square, “said Ramos. “We participated in the parade, and we threw out candy along with the rest of the people but that was littering for us, and we didn’t feel so good about it although I know the kids enjoyed it. The next day we drove through and saw the candy still on the sides of the streets with a chance of rain and we didn’t want it to get into the wastewater system and go into Center Hill Lake. We knew it wasn’t safe enough for us to stand on the sides of the streets and sweep it all up without someone helping us out because we didn’t have brooms and all that. When we drove through the public square and saw the trash there along with candy on the ground, we knew that was a safer place for us to do something so that is how cleaning the public square came about for us,” said Ramos.