I want to thank council member Charlie Miranda, code enforcement, and whoever is responsible for building the Tampa.gov website. The website is relatively easy to use and has a pretty smart design (though there’s still room for improvement!) and all have promptly responded. Thanks to everyone for their prompt and courteous response.
Unfortunately, the end result is that the trash will most likely remain there while the City goes through their procedures to prompt Bank of America (the current owner of the property) to reply.
And, really, Bank of America should have dealt with this long ago. Even if they weren’t regularly checking their property, the person responsible has been contacted several times (and now seems to be avoiding our phone calls).
So, it looks like now that the city will wait until the last month in October to clean up the property. In the meantime they will be citing Bank of America and sending them official letters telling them they need to clean the property.
It’s occurred to me that I could flyer the local neighbors and have us all meet to pick up a bag or two, but the last time I tried removing trash even more got piled on top.
Finally, this brings us to a larger city-wide problem. Are banks doing their job in taking care of foreclosed properties? Is it possible to force banks to be good neighbors?
[...] In September we had a house down the street with a yard full of bags of garbage. (See here, and here). It was eventually cleaned up, but it prompted some thoughts on how to deal with neighborhood [...]