Skip to main contentIs it a creepy, Soviet-style spy plan? Or an innovative way to provide a public service at limited taxpayer cost?
Last week, the City of Portland launched a pilot program that encourages neighbors to send in online complaints with photographs of overgrown grass and weeds on other people's lawns.
Offending property owners could face fines of $216 a month.
"Would that make you want to mow your lawn?" asks Ross Caron, a spokesman for Portland's Bureau of Development Services, the local agency responsible for curbing neighborhood problems like out-of-control yards.
In the program's first nine days, 36 complaints poured in—complaints that would have been ignored before the pilot program unofficially deputized Portlanders as grass-and-weed cops.
The new program is a response to severe budget cuts at the Bureau of Development Services.
Managed by City Commissioner Randy Leonard, BDS ran into deep financial problems last year when building permits and fees dried up because construction slowed amid the recession. The bureau responded to the reduction of its main money sources by slashing jobs. One of the first casualties was the enforcement program for getting rid of neighborhood eyesores and hazards like dry grass, which can cause fires. Due to budget cuts, staff in that department shrank from 34 to 16 people.
That loss annoyed Valerie Curry, then-president of the Argay Neighborhood Association. Curry recently retired as president of the outer-Northeast neighborhood association. But she now praises the city for its new online-reporting idea. She says neighborhoods suffer when property owners ignore city requirements that grass be less than 10 inches high.
"I'm very relieved," she says.
Under the new program, annoyed neighbors must log on to the BDS website (portlandonline.com/bds/gwcomplaints) and note the exact address of the delinquent property owner—plus attach a photo of the problem.
BDS lacks the ability to take complaints about grass and weeds over the phone because of its budget woes. And the city's new iPhone application for complaints can accept reports about problems only on city-owned property, not private land.
One consequence of complaining online is that the names of people who inform on their neighbors will become a matter of public record, so there's no hope of remaining anonymous. (BDS says it won't volunteer the name of the complainant to the bad neighbor, however.)
After the city gets a complaint online, BDS sends the property owner a letter telling him he has 30 days to fix the problem. If after 30 days, he doesn't call BDS to say he mowed his lawn or pulled the weeds, BDS will send an inspector. And if there's still tall grass or weeds, BDS will slap the owner with a $216 fine every month until the lawn is taken care of.
Before the massive cuts, neighbors could make complaints but nothing would happen until city investigators went out to witness the problem. Investigators would then give property owners 15 days to resolve the issue, then return for a second look. If still nothing was done, the city would pay a third party to clean up the mess and hope to recoup the cost from the homeowner. Staff time alone on a single complaint ran into the hundreds of dollars, Caron says.
This new complaint system starts the process without a City of Portland employee ever leaving his cubicle, a fact that frightens one privacy-loving Portlander who wrote to WW to complain about neighbors' complaining but didn't want her name to appear in the paper.
"In the Soviet-era Moscow special phone booths were provided with a direct line to the KGB to inform on each other," she wrote. "This is big-brother, non-Portland-style creepy."
WWeek 2015