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Letter to the editor

Tidy property owners to get a pat on back

By ANNE LINDBERG
Published May 4, 2005

LEALMAN - The first step to beautifying this unincorporated area was cleaning it up. Now it's time for the second step: rewarding folks who have kept their houses neat and pretty.

Tonight the Lealman Community Association will accept the first nominations for homes or businesses that are a credit to the area, aesthetically speaking. Each month, the association will accept more nominations. An association committee will choose monthly winners.

The winner will get a sign to display. A picture will be shown on a local bulletin board and at LCA meetings for one year.

"I'm hoping this will be a positive encouragement that the citizens will be doing rather than the government will be doing," said Donna Robbins, head of the LCA beautification committee.

Beautification has long been a goal in the Lealman area, which stretches from just east of Interstate 275 to Park Street between Pinellas Park and St. Petersburg. The area is split by Kenneth City.

When community residents created a redevelopment plan for the central portion of east Lealman (the side east of Kenneth City), appearance improvements were high on the list of goals.

Residents on the redevelopment task force wanted to help property owners by educating them, helping them find low-cost loans and rewarding them for improvements.

Later those activists staged successive cleanups, which netted about 640 tons of garbage.

Now the area is waiting for a three-year toll to run so it can become the first unincorporated area to have county-contracted garbage service with one company. Generally, residents of unincorporated areas individually contract for garbage service or carry their trash to the dump.

The next logical step was to give folks an additional incentive to keep their properties spruced up. The idea of creating a yard of the month seemed ideal. But the committee overseeing the selection has few rules, Robbins said.

"We don't need to have a lot of rules because we're going to allow the Lealman people . . . to submit the houses," Robbins said. "We wanted to keep it encouraging."

The main idea, at least at first, is to reward people who have a long history of maintaining their properties, she said.

Group members want to concentrate on houses at first but are not ruling out businesses. Eventually they would like to reward one house and one business each month, Robbins said.

The LCA will meet at 7 tonight at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, 4145 34th St. N, next to the Pepsi plant.

[Last modified May 4, 2005, 00:57:19]