By Marney Simon | Enterprise Staff
Plainfield’s village leaders are reminding the public to keep their yards in order now that summer has arrived.
On June 11, members of the village board held a brief discussion on the village ordinance on yard maintenance, which requires residents to keep their lawns trimmed. Lawns that reach 8 inches are in violation of the ordinance.
“A couple of conversations have been going on with code enforcement and keeping up properties and different citizens asking questions about how that all works. It is an extensive process in some ways,” said Trustee Margie Bonuchi. “We’re trying to keep up with all the people that are not cutting lawns when the grass gets very high, when the property is unkept. Many times, it’s deserted, so there’s a process that goes through code enforcement.”
Bonuchi was curious to find out if the process to tag violators and get overgrown lawns taken care of could be done any quicker.
Village Administrator Brian Murphy said the village is following its own ordinances, but code enforcement could possibly investigate a way to hurry up the process, so that overgrown lawns don’t sit for too long.
“The way that we have the noticing… is currently you do have to wait for the violation to occur, you do have to give a certain amount of time for the property owner to affect the improvement themselves before we go out on the property,” Murphy said. “The last time we reviewed the ordinance we did change the noticing requirement to make it so that we only have to give one notice per season, so the next time [a property owner] reaches the 8 inches, we don’t have to wait for a period of time then, we can affect the mowing rather quickly.”
Murphy said for most property owners, the first fine is usually enough for them to take better care of their properties.
“But there are quite a number of them that are out there. So, perhaps we can work with the code enforcement group to see if there’s a different way we can do that noticing requirement and still be within the legal property rights that people do have,” Murphy said.
Murphy added that residents likely won’t be pleased if the village ends up mowing their properties.
“You really don’t want us mowing your lawn,” Murphy said. “At the end of day, we are a very expensive lawn service, it’s usually about $285 for us to come on over and mow your lawn, and we do not do a very good job at it, we do the bare minimum. So truly, you do not want to wait for us to be mowing your grass.”
Bonuchi also asked about dirt mounds on empty lots, where properties are sold but any building on that property hasn’t been started. The trustee wanted to know if there was a way to deal with those properties and hold property owners accountable.
Murphy said code enforcement could look closer at any dirt stockpiles and see if current ordinances can address clean up at those sites.