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Magallanes stood next to a cabinet, electric fan and whiteboard dumped beside the rail line, while across the tracks was another pile of litter, including a broken toilet.

Magallanes said the city doesn’t have enough sanitation trucks to keep up with all the service requests: “If I hired 20 extra trucks of sanitation in Watts, do you think there’d be a piece of wrapper on the floor? No.”

Big trucks, often with their license plates removed, pull into Watts in the dead of night and jettison their loads to avoid paying fees for legal disposal, Magallanes said, adding, “They know they can dump it in this community and nobody will care.”

Trash accumulates in Watts for several reasons, said George Magallanes, newly elected Councilmember Tim McOsker’s deputy district director for Watts.

Magallanes believes the problem is simpler: Union Pacific, he said, doesn’t “want to take responsibility.”