Neighbors Praise City For Abating Nuisance Property

Sarah Brown

Julie and Jim Wall are so grateful to Code Enforcement Officer Blake Dawson that they said they would vote for him as president of the United States.

In the past two weeks, Dawson and a clean-up crew have cleared off nearly an acre full of, essentially, garbage at the end of Surrey Lane. Julie Wall, who lives on that small street off Ames Creek Road, said the occupant on the property had been adding to a mess that’s been a problem for decades.

“It became a garbage dump of egregious and outlandish proportions,” she said. “The thing I dislike most about Sweet Home is things like this.”

She asked rhetorically why a town wouldn’t do something about things like this sooner? – Probably, she figured, because of its location. While most of the houses on the street are well-maintained, she believes the community in general thought of Surrey Lane residents as “low life” because of the lack of maintenance or cleanliness on a certain parcel of property that is owned by a trust, located at the end of the road. Perhaps, if true, those feelings could also be attributed to activity that happened on the property in question.

In 2021, Page Lee Butterfield was sentenced to life in prison for the second-degree murder of Corey A. Burdick after shooting him in 2019 at 541 Surrey Lane. Ervin Larry Smith, who lived in a trailer on the property at the time, was also shot, but survived the incident. The defense reported the altercation arose from a drug deal between Butterfield and Burdick.

But now, Wall said, she feels the City “realized” Surrey Lane residents aren’t all as bad as that. According to her, several residents on the street have made failed attempts over the years to try to get the property cleaned up until they recently kind of came together and determined themselves to get something done.

“There’s tons of burnt and buried trash over by the creek leaking into the state waterway,” Dawson said. “We didn’t see a lot of that initially, and then as we started cleaning up a lot of the junk and debris, we started uncovering tons of buried and burnt garbage under the ground, so it’s a big public health concern.”

Dawson, who’s only been employed by the City for about a year now, said he took on the task of reviewing multiple code violations that had been started by his predecessors, and the Surrey Lane property was among the worst.

What he found at 541 Surrey Lane were two structures that had burned and/or were damaged from a fire a couple decades ago, creating “serious,” “dangerous,” “absolutely nightmare” conditions. There were also lots of household debris scattered throughout the property, which appeared to have been brought in over the past years. Dawson talked to the occupant on the property (Smith) and multiple family members on the trust, but no movement was made to rectify the situation.

Through some research, Dawson and Community and Economic Development Director Blair Larsen learned the property was left to multiple family members in a trust out of Arkansas. There appears to have been more property to the trust at one point, but it had been sold off over the years. Now there’s about an acre or so left.

“Most of the trust – about eight people – I think abandoned the area, and then there’s a local who’s still squatting, essentially, in the shacks that were left there,” Dawson said.

Part of the delay in getting the property abated was that Smith continued to live on the property and continued to bring more stuff onto the land, Larsen added. The only way to correct the problem was to demolish the structures and clear up the garbage.

“Eventually, after enough time, the City just took over and resolved the problem,” Dawson said.

Larsen explained the city and state codes provide a process for them to go through to clean property. Initially, multiple notices of code violations are handed out and the property owners are “typically given a period of time to correct that. If they don’t correct it, there’s a couple different ways the City can go about it.”

Normally, he said, the owners are issued citations and fines until the problem is corrected. This often involves a process through the municipal court where a judge may offer to waive the fines if the problem is corrected.

“That is limited because it depends on the property owner to respond,” Larsen said.

Eventually those fines may lead to a lien on the property, he said. The other option is abatement, which is what happened on Surrey Lane. That means after violation notices and the passing of time without correction of the problem, the City goes in and does the clean up themselves. Often it involves hauling off large amounts of junk or boarding up a structure. In the case of Surrey Lane, two of the structures were actually torn down because they were unsafe.

“The problem with that is the City has to have the money to do it in the first place,” Larsen said.

In this case, Larsen had to approach the city manager to get approval for contingency funds in order to clear the property.

“We would’ve abated it earlier, but it was a budget issue where we didn’t have approval,” he said. “I feel terrible that it’s been so long (the neighbors) have dealt with this nightmare.”

Essentially it is taxpayer money that funds the abatement of properties, but the City then turns the bill over to the property owners for repayment. The City first has to have funds available to start the process, though. Another part of the problem is actually getting repayment from the property owner.

Larsen said they have had some property liens for several years now, and he expects they’ll never get the money back until the property is sold. The City, however, could foreclose on the property, but that’s not a route they like to take because “nobody likes to take peoples’ property.”

He estimates the cost for abatement at 541 Surrey Lane will come to about $20,000. In fact, according to Larsen, the garbage had spilled over onto 555 Surrey Lane (also owned by the family trust) and the house has been condemned, but there was no budget left to remove that structure, so the City will just board it up.

Wall made a statement that Smith was giving Dawson a hard time for going onto his property and forcefully clearing it, and Dawson agreed there indeed has been some push back.

“He’s had multiple violations for a long time and they’ve been asking him to fix it for a long time, and he chooses not to,” Dawson said.

He believes Smith doesn’t trust law and government and rules.

“You have a lot of rights and you have a lot of responsibilities,” Dawson said. “There’s a difference between pure freedom to do whatever you want – whether it’s right or wrong – and then there’s doing the right thing and also being expected to have a community-driven mindset.”

He added they believe Smith has a background that may be creating barriers for himself, and they’ve offered resources to help (i.e., services for low income and elderly), but he refuses to pursue them because it’s through organizations he doesn’t trust.

“Some people don’t agree with a lot of things,” Dawson said. “That’s their right, their free will.”

Larsen said he understands this is a community where everybody wants to preserve property rights. Finding that line to define when a property owner has gone too far can be difficult because everyone has different ideas of what that looks like, he said, and it’s things like that that add to the time it takes to get a property cleaned up.

The Surrey Lane property was pretty bad, he said. Two of the structures that were torn down this past week were in “very, very poor shape” and “extremely unsafe.” In addition to unsafe structures, debris, burned garbage and buried trash all over the land, city staff found a hole filled with raw sewage. The property had no utilities or sewage services, nor functioning toilets, causing inadequate and unsafe practices.

“I don’t know what exactly was used, I don’t like to think about it, but whatever it was it was not safe and not adequate and is a violation, especially that close to Ames Creek,” Larsen said.

He said city staff will request liens for other properties with code violations during the Feb. 13 City Council meeting. Surrey Lane will not be among them because they do not have a total cost figured out yet, but he noted properties on 55th Avenue and Nandina Street are among some recent city abatement projects.

“Blake has no lack of work,” Larsen said. “There are a number of properties that he’s working on that, if we had the budget to go ahead and abate, we would do it, but we don’t have sufficient funds to abate everything, so we try to pick the worst and go after the worst and in the meantime, until we have the money to abate, we try to work with the property owners to get them to do it, and sometimes fines and citations is the only way we can do that.”

Needless to say, Wall expressed happiness to see the property getting the attention she wanted it to get from the City, and she cited her husband as the “glue” in the neighborhood that got everyone together and brought it to Dawson.

Wall called Dawson “an absolute godsend” and “worth every penny” the City is paying him.

“This is an historic time,” she said. “This man has really, really done something.”

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