LAKE COUNTY — The County of Lake’s new hazardous vegetation abatement ordinance has been in effect since late April, but no penalties have as yet been levied on noncompliant property owners.
The ordinance, which expands brush clearing requirements for lots with and without structures, allows the county to hire contractors to remove vegetation on negligent property owners’ behalf and then charge them for the work done.
The new rules received unanimous support from the board of supervisors, who passed them in March. The ordinance had been heavily revised over a nearly four-month period after residents slammed an early draft in December 2018, raising concern over potentially massive fines for noncompliance and a number of other issues.
But the late adoption of the ordinance threw off the timing of its enforcement, creating uncertainty for some over how forcefully to push property owners to clear their brush when summer temperatures, and fire danger, are high.
District 5 Supervisor Rob Brown said in June during a board discussion on enforcing the ordinance that the kind of work noncompliant property owners are being asked to perform could cause fires if done wrongly, especially on larger properties with fuel loads that include tall, thick vegetation.
“This isn’t landscaping the garden,” Brown said, “this is major… It can be done, but it’s gotta be done in the wintertime when it’s safe.”
Mary Jane Montana, chief building official for the county, said at the same meeting: “We knew this when the ordinance was passed that we had a very short window.”
Nevertheless, code enforcement officer Andrew Williams, who has worked extensively on the hazardous vegetation ordinance enforcement since the county began inspecting properties in May, said earlier this month that many property owners had quickly cleaned up their land after getting notice letters.
“We’re seeing changes already,” Williams said.
About 1,500 properties around the county were inspected for compliance with the ordinance beginning in May, according to Montana. Of those, 417 were found to be out of compliance, and owners were sent what Willams called “notices to abate.”
These letters urged property owners to abate their land within 21 days or face a potential administrative citation. After that timeframe, according to Williams, he and other code enforcement officers began revisiting the flagged properties, checking on the progress they’d made, if any.
“In general people want to do the right thing,” Williams mused. He noted that to date, of the 417 initially overgrown properties, about 55–60 percent had been brought into compliance voluntarily by landowners.
A spreadsheet obtained by this newspaper showing the properties inspected by county crews for compliance with the ordinance affirms this estimate: 55 percent of the properties inspected a second time were found to have been appropriately cleared.
Of the 346 properties included in the spreadsheet, which was updated this week, 192 were found compliant, 48 were still a hazard, and 106 had not yet been revisited.
For those properties that haven’t yet been fixed, Williams noted, secondary “notice of violation” letters will eventually be sent out, starting a 30 day clock that would then allow the county to perform abatements on properties and put the costs on lien.
But Williams said the county is hesitant to take that step, citing safety issues that reflect the concerns raised in the June supervisors’ meeting. Williams said his office has a list of properties to which notices of violation would be sent, but no go-ahead.
“Because this got started so late,” Williams said, “it’s a safety issue at this point.”
Instead of pushing for abatement as soon as possible, code enforcement officers are keeping their sights on “voluntary compliance,” said Williams. Property owners, some of whom have cited long wait times for contractors to be able to perform the abatement work necessary to clear their lots of dangerous materials, are being assured that if they are actively working toward compliance, they won’t be cited.
“If you’re moving forward,” Williams said, then “more time” will be given. “It’s the people that absolutely have done nothing” that the county may fine, he added.
One challenge code enforcement has run up against is communicating to out-of-county landowners that they need to clear brush from their properties that are sometimes thousands of miles from home.
“That’s one of our stumbling blocks right now,” Williams said, “is getting absentee owners to get compliant.”
Still, many out-of-county and out-of-state owners, as listed by their mailing addresses in the spreadsheet mentioned above, have cleared their properties following initial notification.
More than 59 percent of the properties listed have mailing addresses outside of Lake County. Of those, 22 are outside of California, with some properties receiving mail in Colorado, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and even New Zealand.
But most of the more far-flung owners appear to have managed to get their properties abated: of 22 out-of-staters, only two that were rechecked were found to still not be in compliance.
The prioritization of properties to be inspected is not defined by the ordinance, but the county’s list of inspections includes land throughout its jurisdiction. Williams said “population density” and “severity” of fuel load were two factors taken into account by code enforcement when deciding where to inspect.
