A dump site on Butte Road south of Creswell is recognized by neighbors as the ‘messy site.’
County officials are hoping the owners of properties littered with household junk, auto parts and rusty appliances will have more incentive to take their trash to county dumps after a new program is implemented in June.
The program will give property owners coupons to dump free of charge as much as five pickup truck loads of refuse at any of Lane County’s 17 garbage transfer sites located throughout the area. County commissioners Anna Morrison and Cindy Weeldreyer, who represent rural areas of the county, initiated the program after they learned several owners with “nuisance properties” could not afford to pay the $13 fee to drop off a truck-load of garbage.
“The property owners were very nice and understood the problem,” Weeldreyer said, “But they just simply said, ‘I don’t have money to take the garbage to the dump.’”
Weeldreyer said most of the refuse is common material that just never left an owner’s property.
“Generally there are garbage cans overflowing, cars not running and washing machines sitting in view of the neighbors,” she said.
Lane County has several ordinances that forbid leaving excessive amounts of garbage in areas visible to other residents in the immediate area. Property owners who do not take advantage of the coupons offered by the county will face daily fines and possible liens on the property by the county, Weeldreyer said.
Garbage was not that big of a problem in suburban areas of Lane County, but Weeldreyer said that “the by-ways of certain areas of rural Lane County are getting pretty junky.”
Mike Turner, technical specialist with the Lane County waste management office, said the county is “trying to make it a little easier to clean up nuisance properties.” He said the county is predicting that 50 properties will be eligible for the coupons. If all 50 property owners accept the offer, the county stands to lose $3,250 in dumping fees, he said.
John Cole, manager of the county’s land management program which enforces county code regulations, said his office is stepping up garbage ordinance enforcement and hopes people will take advantage of the coupon program. Cole said investigators only inspect properties after receiving complaints.
“If someone calls and says, ‘My neighbor’s house is full of crap, can you come help?’ then we investigate,” he said.
Once at site, Cole said, his office always tries to talk with owners to work out a solution before handing out fines and never aggressively enforces the codes.
“No one goes out with baseball bats, knocks down doors and arrests people for these things,” he said.
The general process for dealing with property owners who do not clean up their properties is to deliver letters that Cole said start out with “please clean up your property” and get progressively more demanding if owners don’t comply.
If by the fifth letter, owners have not cleaned up their properties, Cole said, they could be fined $500 a day or face liens on the properties. One property south of Creswell that Cole described as “so far gone it’s the poster child of crappy properties” had a lien of $95,000 against it and was eventually taken over by the county.
The county is not expecting a significant influx of garbage as a result of the coupon program because it was designed by the county to help clean up neighborhood eyesores, not as a solution to heavily polluted or littered sites, Cole said.
The county will start handing out coupons June 1.