BATON ROUGE — A local advocate is pushing to make it easier for the public to combat blight, specifically focusing on the illegal dumping of tires.

Parry Matt Thomas has spent years addressing blight and tire dumping, including serving on the mayor-president's transition team on a subcommittee dedicated to the issue.

Over the years, he has seen thousands of discarded tires piled along curbsides, scattered across vacant properties and dumped beside buildings.

"If a property gets dumped on, the only recourse is that the city has to basically penalize the person who's the victim. I want to change it so that they're protected. I also want to make sure that the municipality that ends up collecting the tires doesn't have to pay the cost of the disposal," Thomas said.

Currently, tire buyers pay a $2.25 fee per tire to cover recycling costs.

"When people go in to buy new tires and those old tires are left with the vendor, quite frequently, the vendor, rather than pay for disposal, they'll dump them throughout the parish; of course, individuals may be doing that as well," East Baton Rouge Metro Councilwoman Laurie Adams said.

Thomas wants to overhaul the system by adding a disposal fee alongside a matching, refundable deposit on every tire at the wholesale level.

"What this proposal would do is have wholesalers make a deposit on tires with the state when they come into the state, so you change the incentives; then your tire shop, when they get those tires, they take old tires and they'd be able to turn those tires in and receive a refund or a rebate," Adams said.

Under the plan, when a used tire is returned, the state would pay the disposal fee to a recycler and refund the deposit to the person or business returning the tire.

"We want to go to an incentive-based system where people get to turn the tires in to get their deposit back," Thomas said.

Tuesday night, the Metro Council introduced a resolution backing Thomas' plan as he prepares to take it to state lawmakers.

"We have a meeting on December 11 with the Senate Committee on blighted properties, and they've set up that meeting to discuss tires specifically, and it would be good to have the city council stand behind us," Thomas said.

The Metro Council is scheduled to vote on the resolution at its next meeting, Nov. 24.