MARYSVILLE — The city of Marysville’s Clean Sweep on Saturday, April 26, kicked off with its annual Shred-A-Thon, which saw a near-record number of vehicles dropping off thousands of pounds of papers to be shredded.

“We had 424 vehicles, the second highest volume since this started in 2010, handing over 14,000 pounds of material,” said Doug Buell, public information officer for the city of Marysville. “For the first year this year, we also had the Marysville Sunrise Rotary collecting styrofoam, and they filled a long truck-trailer chest-high with it by the time they were done.”

The Shred-A-Thon also collected 26 computer towers and laptops, 24 keyboards, and an assortment of monitors and miscellaneous PC items, with volunteers such as Kirstin Tyner of HomeStreet Bank and John Nguyen of the Kiwanis Key Club at Marysville Getchell High School scooping up boxes and bags full of unwanted paper, and unloaded them into the waiting American Data Guard shredding trucks.

“This Clean Sweep event was a huge success again,” Buell said. “Our goal was to help prevent residents from falling prey to identity theft, as well as help them do a little spring cleaning after tax time. We even gave them a place to donate their old computers, to tech-savvy students who donate them to Third World schools.”

The students of the Marysville Arts and Technology High School’s LAN Club will wipe out the equipment’s old data, then restore the items for fundraisers.

Buell extended additional thanks to the Marysville branch of Windermere Real Estate and the North County Outlook.

Elsewhere around the city, students and other community members were mobilized by city of Marysville Parks Maintenance Manager Mike Robinson, who assigned painting crews to specific hot-spots and street-side fences along the city’s three busiest and most visible north-south roadways — State Avenue, 51st Avenue/Shoultes Road and 67th Avenue — for this year’s “Graffiti Paint-Out.”

It was 10-year-old Riley Coffren’s first time covering up graffiti tags, with paint that had been picked out to match the pre-existing color of the fence lining the east side of 51st Avenue just south of the roundabout, but he had his mom, city executive assistant and Youth Council Liaison Leah Ingram, there to help him out. They were joined by a trio of seniors from Marysville Getchell’s School for the Entrepreneur — Hunter Gardlin, Hunter Wood and Eli Angull — who touched up the upper and lower parts of the same sections of fence, at the same time, to finish more quickly.

“Graffiti is an incredible problem all over, and it’s one of the most significant issues that I’m asked about by our citizens,” Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring said. “It’s great to see everyone stepping up like this.”

The Clean Sweep activities were coordinated between the Marysville City Hall, Public Works, Community Development, Code Enforcement, and Parks and Recreation departments, with the Marysville City Council budgeting $60,000 for neighborhood Clean Sweep activities in 2014. Door-hangers promoting this year’s event were distributed to more than 1,000 homes along the three targeted streets, to help boost volunteer turnout.

You can report graffiti 24 hours a day on the city of Marysville’s website, along with potholes or streetlights that have gone out, by logging onto at www.marysvillewa.gov/index.aspx?nid=369.