Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Letter: Clean-Up and Slow Down
THANKS for your great community news and information -- so valuable to our community.
I'm writing, as a 15-year Buckingham resident, requesting you to post a plea, reflecting not just my own sentiments but many that I hear from neighbors: Please CLEAN UP and SLOW DOWN, Arlington!
Our local streets are filthy with litter, a lot of it cigarette butts. Please don't litter -- so very inconsiderate -- and clean up the debris surrounding your residence, including the gutters and sidewalks. Our neighborhood is really becoming a mess due to the carelessness and laziness of a few.
And please obey the speed limits, especially on the secondary streets that may not have posted the legal speed limit of 25 MPH. The speeders are endangering the lives of our residents and their pets.
Thank you,
David Giger
Buckingham
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Labels: letter, traffic, trash
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
BCCA to Litterbugs: You Have Two Days
A property owner, slapped with a warning from the Arlington County Code Enforcement Office, has 10 business days to clear away trash. Well, if the property is an apartment complex, most likely the trash will be cleared away within the next week. The owner or management never faces a fine, only a warning, so that owner can keep mounding then clearing the trash, week after week.
This became apparent during a presentation by Marlene Terreros-Oronao, a historic preservation code inspector, at the BCCA meeting Monday night, Sept. 17.
Said Pat Hope, the BCCA president, “Essentially, there’s no code enforcement in code enforcement…I know Code Enforcement contacts them [the offending property owners]…They thumb their noses at them, at us.”
Ms. Terreros-Oronao said if the BCCA wants the code to have teeth, it needs to be brought into line with other codes that only allow two days for a property owner to fix infractions.
“I would like this [code] to be changed from 10 to two,” Ms. Terreros-Oronao said. This will force property owners to realize there is a recurrent problem that needs a better fix than weekly removal, people at the meeting said.
Ms. Terreros-Oronao said without any teeth in that code, she relies more on education, telling property owners what they should be doing.
“Once I educate the person who’s doing it, I don’t have a problem,” she said.
So, at the meeting’s end, the BCCA voted to ask the county board to change the law to force litterbug property owners to clean-up in two business days or face the $100 fine. The next step, Mr. Hope said, is to bring this to the Civic Federation to see if other neighborhoods wish to add their voices.
Labels: Code Enforcement, trash
