The City of Pampa Commissioners met on Monday afternoon for a regularly-scheduled meeting. Commissioner Bryan Fisher was absent for the meeting.
The Commissioners received a crash-course on a couple of processes within the city government about high weeds and grass, and the budget process.
The high weeds and grass process is complaint-driven, with complaints coming in through phone, e-mail or the Community Pride app. High weeds have to be higher than 12 inches to be out-of-compliance, but the City does monitor areas such as Duncan, downtown and Highways 60 and 70.
After the complaint comes in, Deputy Fire Chief Mike Day inspects the property to confirm and the owner is contacted, but it can take some time to track down the owner.
After contact is made, the owner has seven days and the property is checked again.
“If the property has been mowed, the complaint is resolved,” Stokes said. “If the property remains in violation, it’s forwarded to the Parks Department for mowing.”
The Parks crew that does the mowing is made up of three employees and their equipment. The crew will do a before and after pictures and an invoice/citation is generated and sent to the property owner and Municipal Court.
“According to ordinance, the first violation is a minimum of $100 and maximum of $500,” Stokes said. “Additional violations are a minimum of $200 and a maximum of $500, plus court costs.”
The City used to use a lien process, but hardly recouped any of the costs for mowing the property. In 2020, they switched to the citation process.
“If nothing else, they may never pay that but in the end it gets turned over to collections,” Stokes said. “It will reflect on their credit rating and maybe that it is important enough to them to try and take care of these.”
In 2019, there were 640 total complaints and 280 of those were resolved by the owner, which left 354 turned over to the City. The violation was completely ignored by 158 complaints, 96 of those were post-office returns (unsigned, no none address/property owner).
“At that point any chance of getting money out of that is null and void,” Stokes said. “Of the 158 there were 27 that mowed the property and not the alley and 28 mowed the back yard and the alley.”
The average cost for the City to take care of the property was $250 in 2019. Multiply that times 354, and it costs the City $87,650. The City was able to recoup about $3,000.
In 2020 after starting the citation process, there were 610, 306 were turned into the Parks for mowing. The City was able to recoup $2,800 through the citations (14 paid citations), with the hit on the general fund being about $73,700.
Stokes told the Commissioners that many cities either have a similar process to deal with the nuisance, contract mowing out or they don’t enforce it at all.
After the presentation, Mayor Lance DeFever and Commissioner Jimmy Keough lauded the work of the Parks crew. Commissioner Paul Searl asked if a citation was the best they could do in terms of enforcement.
“The only way we could issue an arrest warrant is if we have their signature on the citation,” Stokes said. “Even if we did (have their signature on a citation), you guys are all familiar with the situation at the jail and it being full, or near full. Most of the time it’s a question of are we really going to put someone in jail who didn’t mow their yard?
“It comes down to that signature. If we had the signature we could have some recourse if we don’t get payment. Would we do that for one payment? Maybe not. But if we got two or three and they end up owing us a couple of thousand dollars, it might be something worth going after. The repeat offenders are sadly usually commercial properties and mowing one time is far more than the average of $250. It can get into $500-$600 to mow their property one time.”
The Commissioners did also receive a presentation on the budget process as the City is early in the budget process.
• Minutes of the May 24, 2021, Regular Commission Meeting as presented.
• Resolution No. R21-020, a Resolution of the City of Pampa authorizing the Mayor to enter into an Interlocal Agreement with Panhandle Regional Planning Commission for 9-1-1 Services and Equipment.
• Resolution No. R21-021, a Resolution by the City Commission adopting Executive Order GA-34 and extending to July 12, 2021, the City of Pampa’s Declaration of Local Disaster Order.
• Resolution No. R21-022, a Resolution by the City of Pampa authorizing refunding of Canadian River Municipal Water Authority Revenue Refunding Bonds.
• First reading Ordinance No. 1753, an Ordinance by the City
• Revising in the Code of Ordinances the definition of Health Officer to include Code Enforcement Officer.
