Jerry Brow points to a hot tub, or at least what remains of it. Its rickety shell, he says, has been decaying on the curb of Sizemore Avenue — a little street on Atlanta’s western edge — for weeks.
Stepping a few feet into the woods, he notes a tossed out commode, broken dressers, overturned utility buckets, old toys, and construction gear; as well as far more personal items, like a stranger’s letterhead stationery, blank checks and a BP gas card. He’s lost count of the number of tires abandoned on this road.
This is just one block in Brow’s walking tour of one of the city’s most notorious sites for illegal trash and tire dumping. Brow, a Mississippi-based builder who has bought about a dozen properties in Northwest Atlanta since 2004, says he’s spent the better part of a decade trying to get the folks at Atlanta City Hall to do more to fix the problem. But instead, he says, they’ve at times contributed to it.
He and a fellow property owner recently filed a lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court, accusing the city of negligence when it comes to maintaining the public right of way. Even worse, he says he’s seen city crews pick up portions of trash, then sweep or push the rest onto private property, leaving homeowners responsible for its removal. When the property owners don’t, they’re vulnerable to citations and hefty fines.
“In the 10 years I’ve been out here, I’ve never seen them clean up everything,” says Brow, who shows a reporter years of photos he has collected of the problem.
To find out what Mayor Kasim Reed's administration says the city is doing to combat blight on the Westside, read more at myAJC.com.
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