Grass height in Marietta City Council’s crosshairs

When that doesn’t work, however, code enforcement must either take more aggressive action or inform neighbors that “they may have to endure the unkempt situation for weeks (sometimes months) because of the time granted by the current code,” wrote Rusty Roth, Marietta’s director of development services, in the memo.

“Bringing an unwilling property owner to court generally takes no less than four weeks and includes many hours of work and many pages of paperwork,” Roth wrote. “Cases that involve house repairs or other housing related maintenance may often take months. Further, the fines included in the current regulations are very low ($50 — $100 for repeat offenders) and do not seem to provide any deterrent for those who will not maintain their property.”

A proposed rewrite of the ordinance, with input from the city solicitor, lays out the crackdown council is considering for cases where voluntary compliance has failed, and the grass has grown 12 inches or higher.

The current process calls for two written notices — the first gives a property owner seven days; the second warning provides another five days — before property owners are taken to court.

Council would shorten that timeline from 12 days to seven days under the proposed rewrite.

The rewrite calls for:

If the grass still hasn’t been cut by the court date, property owners will be again told to clean up the property within five days, and could face a fine of up to $500 and/or six months in prison.

Finally, if the property remains a nuisance, the city will clean it up themselves, and place a debtors lien for the cost to do so on the property.

Repeat offenders (three or more offenses within a year, starting with the date of the first offense) could be fined up to $1,000 and/or six months in prison.

The city’s current penalties are less severe. The fines start at $50 for the first, second and third offense, then increase for the fourth and fifth offenses ($100). Not until the sixth offense does the fine rise to $200, then continues to rise for the seventh ($300), eighth ($400) and ninth ($500). Tenth or further offenses include fines of $1,000.

The council has been generally supportive of some form of crackdown, though Goldstein has expressed concerns about shortening the process too much.

“Still just want to reiterate the concern about the two days with notice on the property, versus sending out something like a five-day notice … I think that would be more appropriate to try and make sure we get the issue resolved, hopefully before we even get to court,” Goldstein said at a March 29 meeting.

Grass height has been an ongoing concern of the council. The MDJ reported on a previous crackdown in 2019, when many fines were doubled to their current levels. And more than a decade ago, in 2010, the MDJ reported that the grass height limit then was 24 inches, not today’s limit of 12 inches.

Credit: Marietta Daily Journal

Credit: Marietta Daily Journal

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