Letters

Gregory Brooks Sebring

Highlands Today
Published: March 20, 2012

Noncomplaint neighborhoods

I was very interested in your story about code enforcement in Highlands County.

In the six years I have lived here, I have seen a marked deterioration in the appearance of homes and yards in my neighborhood and elsewhere in the county.

I tend to believe this is partly because of the economy, amplified by the real estate crisis which hit our area extra hard.

The result is unattractive neighborhoods, which impair the value of even their best-maintained properties.

I applaud the county's enforcement team, which must struggle with a large caseload and with citizens who are unwilling to cooperate.

When I look through the code I do not see harsh restrictions; I see minimal requirements.

What to do about neighborhoods that have numerous violations going back for years is perplexing.

Failure to enforce just assures more deterioration, which will spread to other areas.

Yet, fairness would seem to require giving some consideration to people who didn't create the problem but who now own noncompliant properties.

When I moved to Highlands County, a friend made a joke about retiring in "lakeside squalor." He knew nothing about the area, but his remark seems to have been prescient.

I really hope the county commissioners will look at this as a big-picture issue that affects everything else they are trying to do.

This could include upgrading the code and creating a mechanism to deal fairly but firmly with violations.

Forrest Steele

Lake Placid

Protecting predators

The decline and eventual extinction of the scrub jay is directly related to the protection and proliferation of the sharp shin, cooper and red shoulder hawks in Florida.

We have lots of avian raptors and we're losing our song birds, jays and others.

Why this mismatched priority exists I cannot understand. Hawks have not been endangered in over a decade.

Predators are "protected" at the expense of far more desirable species they are wiping out.