Trash is man's treasure, but county wants it gone

The county asks the state attorney's office to consider charging a property owner with criminal misdemeanors.

By BRIDGET HALL

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 11, 2000

[Times photo: Ron Thompson] Paul Gibson sorts items in his cluttered back yard.

INVERNESS -- Paul Gibson admits he's an addict. He can't stop picking up other people's trash because he hopes that someone else could use it.

He had to take the bags of clothes thrown out by a consignment shop. Someone could still wear them.

He couldn't let the garbage collector take away the wooden crates used to ship Italian marble to construction sites. Someone could still use that lumber.

Chairs, buckets, aquariums, rugs, plastic plants, a sandbox and old cars are all piled up on his property at 661 N Woodlake Ave., just north of the Inverness city limits. Each item was rescued from the curb or the trash bin with the intention of finding it a second home.

"I might have to go to Messy Yard Persons Anonymous," Gibson said with a chuckle. "It's a deeply ingrained thing."

But most of the discards have not found another home beyond Gibson's yard, and his neighbors and county officials aren't laughing.

Neighbors say Gibson's property is an unsightly breeding ground for rats, snakes, spiders, and mosquitoes that travel to their properties.

County code enforcement has been citing Gibson for violations since 1992, with fines to date totaling $13,850.

Last week, the County Commission asked the state attorney's office to consider charging Gibson with criminal misdemeanors for failing to clean up the property as the county has repeatedly asked.

"It is probably one of the worst long-term and blatant cases of sanitary nuisance and junkyard conditions we have," Director of Development Services Gary Maidhof said.

"It's more than an eyesore," added neighbor Margaret Ann Flynn, whose house is in back of Gibson's property. "I'm afraid to open (my back door) because I don't know what's going to crawl in."

Flynn said her problem with rats was so bad last year that she had pest control workers come out daily to empty rat traps.

"It wasn't the little rats, it was the big rats," Flynn said, gesturing with her hands about a foot apart. "I couldn't go in my laundry room without getting attacked."

Flynn has never been bitten by the rats, but she says there have been close calls, such as the time one leaped from her Christmas tree to her washer.

Gibson said he feels bad about the effect his cluttered yard has on the neighbors, and when he heard this week he might face criminal charges, he started to straighten it up.

"I know that I'm a misfit," he said. "But I'm not a criminal."

By trade, Gibson is a janitor who operates his own cleaning service. He has emptied the wastepaper baskets and washed the windows of downtown Inverness offices for years, always with an eye out for anything that can be salvaged.

Gibson says that as a member of the Lion's Club he gives to the community; he is a 131/2-gallon blood donor and was chairman of the county's steering committee for the 1976 bicentennial celebration. "I've been a good citizen, except for my one bad habit of not wanting to see things go to the landfill," he said.

His neighbors are the first to say Gibson is a nice man, but that doesn't ease their concerns about his yard.

"It's not a safe thing. Kids could go on that property and get hurt," said Fran Miller, the neighbor across the street from Gibson. "It makes everything look terrible because of one yard."

Paul Gibson and his wife, Lisa, live on land just under an acre on the eastern edge of Lake Nina. Several sheds built with salvaged lumber sit around the couple's small rectangular house. Secondhand blankets laid out on the home's roof keep water from leaking in.

The area had more deer, foxes and raccoons than people in 1974 when the Gibsons moved in, so there was no one to complain when Paul Gibson brought home the rescued discards of the day.

"We didn't have so many of these laws then," Gibson said. "Then you had all the people coming here from New Jersey, New England and New York, and they brought their laws and ordinances with them. Since they outnumber us, I realize I can't fight these things."

County code enforcement first found Gibson's property in violation for having "junkyard conditions" on July 9, 1992. The inspector gave Gibson 14 days to clean it up.

Gibson missed that deadline and asked for one extension after another. The cycle of violations, fines and missed deadlines continued for the next four years. Gibson said he was trying to clean his yard up, but code enforcement was not satisfied with his progress.

A new complaint was filed in January of 1996, that a homeless man was living in a tent on Gibson's property, burning items and going to the bathroom in the yard. Gibson said his friend now lives in one of the sheds on his property.

Gibson admits to burning trash, but said he doesn't know how public his friend's toilet habits are.

"I have never seen it," Gibson said. "Maybe he does."

After years of talking with officials about Gibson's yard, neighbors became frustrated that nothing seemed any better. At one point there was even talk of a civil suit.

The county ran out of options, too. The property accumulated nearly $14,000 in liens from code enforcement fines, but because a home sits on the land, Florida law prohibits the government from foreclosing on it.

A new avenue opened for the county last May, when the Department of Development Services adopted a rule allowing it to refer unresolved code enforcement cases to the state attorney's office when the violation harms the public "health, safety and/or welfare."

"I asked staff are there any cases that warranted this," Maidhof said. "And they said yes, yes, this one (Gibson's)."

Maidhof said the decision was not made lightly. The vast majority of code enforcement cases are resolved without fines, let alone prosecution, coming into play.

If Gibson is charged criminally and is ordered by a judge to clean up, he would risk a contempt of court citation and possibly jail time by ignoring the order. The court could also order a service to clean up his property and bill Gibson.

Gibson's is only the second case the county has referred for criminal prosecution. The first case involved a wood recycling operation whose owner, Scott Adams, refused to get the permits the county required. The state attorney's office declined to prosecute Adams, instead suggesting that the county sue him in civil court, which it has.

Assistant State Attorney Willard Pope said he has not seen any paperwork on Gibson, but that once he got the file, it would probably take at least a week for him to make a decision on whether to prosecute.

"I should think the state attorney has enough to do with drug addicts and drug dealers on their hands," Gibson said. "But I guess if they don't have enough criminals, they're going to create one out of me."

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