Enforcing Lawn Care

We have had some turnover on our board this year and the new directors are very concerned about homeowner lawn care. We are single family homes zoned site condo. Our CCRs, of course, have several standard statements about the ability to enforce that the units are maintained to high appearance standards, etc. and our city requires that weeds over 8 inches be remedied.

In addition to that, this board would like the ability to require that yards do not contain excessive weeds within the turf(clover, dandelions, crab grass) whether they are kept mowed or not. They would also like to be able to require that brown patches of lawn (from dogs, grubs, etc) be taken care of and the lawns are kept green.

Has anyone had any success with this level of enforcement? It seems like it would be impossible to avoid the appearance of selective enforcement without exact criteria for "too many weeds" spelled out and would be difficult to enforce continuously throughout the season.

Defining 'excessive' weeds, bare or dead patches would be a fruitless task. Trying to enforce such a series of rules would be an even greater waste of time.

Why don't you write letters to the 10 worst offenders. Tell them how bad their yard looks in relation to others. Ask them to put in some time or money to bring their lawn up to others in the community.

And the following messages will point out that some people will not respond to the request. Right - but, some will.

Dee,

We have a rule that no more then 25% of the lawn may be covered by weeds and bare spots are only allowed in planting beds. The two times I was involved in enforcing this policy we included pictures with the violation notice and made sure that the weeds were well over the 25% mark (closer to 35% or greater) so there was little debate on defining 25%.

We have discovered that by including pictures with the notices that corrective responses are quicker as it leaves little room for discussion and the member can see exactly what is being discussed.

Tim