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Sure yard is bare, but there is a drought

In St. Petersburg, too little grass is a violation.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published June 1, 2007

Mitchell Bryant is one of the Lakewood Estates who received a code violation notice about his dead grass, as the city and the state is in the throes of a drought.
	[Times photo: Dirk Shadd]

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Dirk Shadd] Mitchell Bryant, 38, and his 2-year-old son Ellis pose in the front yard of their home in St. Petersburg. Bryant is among the scores of people around St. Pete who have been notified of code violations for not having adequate ground cover. Bryant says he's tried seeding a lawn. It failed. "There's just not enough water. Not now." Howard Troxler's take TroxBlog: Our tax dollars at work

ST. PETERSBURG -- A city codes investigator recently drove through Lakewood Estates and decided to send violation notices to residents whose lawns had too little grass and too much "bare dirt."

To which those folks replied:

What?

There's a drought on!

Take Mitchell Bryant. The pastor of the Old Landmark Cathedral Church lives on Alcazar Way. His lawn looks ... thirsty.

"You'd think they'd be more sensitive to the atmospheric conditions and hold off on the letters," he said one recent evening when a reporter knocked on his door. "I don't know what you're supposed to do. You're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place."

Or at least a dry place.

Rainfall over the last year and a half is way below where it needs to be. One-day-a-week watering restrictions have been in effect since January. Some much-needed rain is forecast for this weekend, but that's probably not going to change the many spotty, dusty, decidedly un-green lawns not just in Lakewood Estates but across the region.

St. Petersburg code compliance folks say they just want to help.

"In a tough time like this, with the drought, we really, truly do try to work with residents," said Todd Yost, the assistant director at the city's code compliance assistance department. "But at the same time we want to try to figure out how to keep that dust down and cover that dirt.

"There will not be a fine," he added.

Yet.

This doesn't appear to be happening anywhere else in the Tampa Bay area.

There's no "bare dirt" code in Tampa.

Or Clearwater.

Or Hillsborough County.

"I don't know how you could ever enforce something like that," said Dexter Barge, Hillsborough's director of code enforcement.

"If your front yard is all dirt," Tampa code enforcement boss Curtis Lane said, "you won't get in trouble."

The letter in St. Petersburg went out to a lot of people, and all over the city, not just Lakewood Estates, Yost said.

It said things about "the conditions," "the health and safety of residents," and making "our neighborhoods nice places to live." It also referred to these "bare dirt areas" and cited Chapter 16, Sec. 16-1064 d (2). The code says the owners of one- and two-family properties must maintain a "herbaceous layer of sod" -- that means grass -- "or ground cover plant material."

Decorative gravel? Not okay.

Crushed stone? Also not okay.

Bryant, the pastor, said that in the past year he planted some Bermuda grass and some winter rye. Didn't take. He even went to Home Depot and bought a fancy green seed spreader.

"I tried," he said. "There's just not enough water. Not now."

The reality is that most lawns in most cases should be able to survive even with just the once-a-week watering, said Angela Polo-Maraj, a landscape education specialist for the Southwest Florida Water Management District. The reasons for grass that's gone and not just brown, she said, probably have to do with more than just the current drought.

Yost says all he's asking is that the folks who got these letters call the code people who sent them.

A fine could come but only after "a very lengthy" process.

"We're talking months," he said.

At this point, he said, residents will get some literature about Xeriscaping. That's a term that comes from a Greek word that means dry. It's a landscaping method that uses trees and shrubs and different sorts of ground covers that don't need as much water.

In the meantime, though, Bryant has another idea.

The pastor's going to pray for rain.

Times staff writers Mike Donila, Bill Varian and Janet Zink contributed to this report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 1, 2007, 01:45:15]