McDonald wants apartments to update old landscaping

Judy Odierna

Monday, Feb. 17, 2003 | 9:52 a.m.

Broken glass, beer cans, weeds and mud are not a good substitute for a flower bed, Las Vegas Councilman Michael McDonald says.

McDonald said the operators of several older apartment complexes have neglected the landscaping of their buildings, and he is proposing an ordinance that would require them to beautify their properties.

The bill will come before a City Council recommending committee at 4 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall.

"We have some owners who collect the rent and don't want to put any money into their property," McDonald said. "They don't live here so they don't care what goes on here. They don't have the community interest at hand."

Multifamily developments within the city are required to maintain landscaping to certain standards. However, older developments approved before the minimum landscape requirements were established in 1997 do not have to meet such standards.

"The problem is when code enforcement or Rapid Response or Neighborhood Services goes out and asks property owners to clean up, right now they can say, 'We don't have to because we don't have land standards,' " McDonald said. "A lot of these were zoned before I was even born."

The new bill will allow the city's code enforcement department to cite developments that do not have adequate landscaping and require them to submit a landscaping plan and then maintain it.

"It isn't everyone," Planning Director Margo Wheeler said. "It isn't like we are going out and doing blanket inspections of properties. It has to be a really serious problem for it to come under this ordinance, like nothing there at all."

McDonald said there are various properties scattered throughout the city, some in Meadows Village in his ward, others in Councilman Michael Mack's district. Some belong to absentee landlords.

"A couple of property owners have called me and said they wanted to have input in the bill," McDonald said. "I told them exactly what it was about and they understood why and how we were doing it. A couple other (property owners contacted) didn't want anything to do with it."

McDonald acknowledges that Nevada is in the middle of a drought but suggests people can use plants that do well in the Las Vegas climate.

"You can take the desert landscaping and then mix in some greens," McDonald said.