BATTLING BLIGHT:
Shelby’s 2016 fiscal budget earmarks $1M for mowing grass.
“It used to be pretty over here. I tell people that and they don’t believe me,” said Arthur Rodgers, 55, as he spent his day off from a warehouse job under a breezy shade tree on Lucy Avenue with his 92-year-old sister and a neighbor.
Late last week, Rodgers, a Lucy resident for nine years (living across from the childhood home of Aretha Franklin) watched as a contracted crew from Shelby County stopped at one of a half-dozen overgrown Natalie Brown Brian Johnson, of Turf Doctors, works to remove overgrown grass. “We can knock out 15 to 30 lots a day with just one crew,” Turf Doctors CEO Natalie Brown said. properties to cut the tall weeds and grass.
“They need to,” said Rodgers, who cuts the vacant lot nextdoor and has a well-tended yard, blooming with red canna and pink naked ladies. And they will. As part of the fiscal 2016 budget, the Shelby County Commission approved a $600,000 budget increase to battle blight. It more than doubles the amount previously being spent, giving the county about $1 million just to cut grass.
“This time last year we were going pretty well and ran out of money in October,” said Lee Hinson, the county’s deputy administrator of parks and grounds and manager of the grass cutting program.
With an original budget of $250,000 for fiscal 2015, the County Commission approved an additional $350,000 that funded the program through March, he said.
They’ve already started spending the funds approved for this fiscal year, which started July 1.
“We’re watching and managing as closely as we can to make sure we don’t run out of money this fiscal year,” Hinson said. “It still depends on what our inventory is and if we keep getting more and more lots through the tax sale. That’s an issue we’ll have to address with the commission at some point, if resources don’t match what we need to do.”
There are 6,423 county-owned properties in the Shelby County Land Bank (real estate acquired through tax sales) and about 1,250 lots are cut each month, said Tom Needham, director of public works.
“There are some lots you don’t have to cut,” Needham said.
About 1,500 parcels, including those that are wooded, landlocked, cut by neighbors, or are roads or alleyways, won’t need to be cut by the county, he said.
Others will get more attention than the typical twice-yearly trim.
“Some of them we get to more often because if they’re actually located in a neighborhood that’s well-maintained, we attempt to cut those lots more often because our goal is to keep the property values up in those areas,” Needham said.
Some lots are cut by county crews or inmates from the county correctional center.
But 70 percent are done by locally owned small businesses.
“We felt like it’s better to enhance our local small companies and help them grow through a program like this,” Hinson said.
It took the two-man Turf Doctors Lawn & Landscape Maintenance crew less than 25 minutes to cut the front and backyards of the house on Lucy.
“We don’t manicure it,” said Natalie Brown, company CEO.
The company, headed by Brown and her high school classmate Brian Johnson, contracted with the county this spring. They started in 2010 with the two of them and were able to expand to add eight people this year, sending five crews across the county.
“We can knock out 15 to 30 lots a day with just one crew,” Brown said. “It’s getting a littler tougher now that the grass is so thick. But our best was 34 lots in one day just with the county.”
They’re paid $85 a property, more if it’s larger or requires more work, she said.
The contractors are required to take before and after pictures of both the front and backyards to prove the work was done.
Still, the Turf Doctors crew drove away with plenty that could be done on that block of Lucy alone. They work for both the city and county, but someone will have to determine if either government is responsible for cutting those properties.
“We may be back,” Brown said.