Some Property Owners Have Brush With Law

When Cathy Kroll pulled into her Ventura driveway at 2 p.m. Wednesday, she was thrilled to see the place scattered with stray leaves and broken twigs.

“I thought, ‘Yes, the weed abatement was here,’ ” Kroll said.

Kroll’s relief was evident, much as it was with others who had their weeds cleared within 100 feet of their homes this week, just days before the county deadline.

Residents were alerted that after today, those who don’t have their brush cleared will risk having a county-hired crew do it for them, for a minimum cost of about $735. But county officials now say they will mail a final notice to stragglers this week, giving them an additional seven days.

Within the city of Ventura, about 1,500 residents such as Kroll were surprised to learn that this year’s deadline had been moved up 30 days to conform with the county’s deadline.

The change left many scrambling to get the job done, some calling in a panic or asking for the work to be finished immediately, said Rich Atmore, owner of Foothill Weed Abatement.

The company has been working overtime to clear weeds, grass and ground cover since mid-April, when the county sent notices to 17,000 households.

Most of these residents live along the outskirts of the cities and the county, areas where wildfire would fly through the brush that skims their property.

The county has had an abatement program since the mid-1960s in hope of creating a space large enough for firefighters to battle a blaze a comfortable distance from a home. It also creates a large zone across which flames cannot easily jump.

As predicted, about 5,000 people countywide have yet to have their weeds chopped, said Kathi Zirretta, fire hazard reduction program manager with the Ventura County Fire Department, but the county sends out plenty of reminders.

“We want the homeowners to comply,” she said. “We’d rather have them do it, so we don’t have to.”

The steep fine and education campaign in effect for several years has led to a 99% compliance rate, which is high compared with other counties, Zirretta said.

Brian Clark, deputy fire marshal for the city of Ventura, said residents who don’t comply usually have legitimate reasons.

“It almost always comes down to a communication problem. Sometimes the property has changed hands or the mail didn’t arrive or they just need to be reminded.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, about 300 Ventura residents still needed to be reminded.

But Kroll wasn’t one of them. Six men scaled up and down the steep hill behind her property on Buena Vista Street, cutting grass and scrub oak while leaving intact the acacia bush she had planted and some purple flowers.

“We aren’t trying to get everything,” Foothill Weed Abatement’s Atmore said. “It’s the dry, dead grasses that will carry the fire up into all these other plants, even the green ones.”

A 1996 fire did threaten the city of Ventura, and Kroll said she felt secure then because her property didn’t have much flammable material around it.

“We didn’t lose a single structure in that fire, and one of the reasons was the property owners creating the area where there was no fuel to burn,” Clark said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Kroll’s half-acre plot took about two hours to be cleared, costing about $350, Atmore said. If the county had to do it after the deadline, it would cost at least $1,000 for the same plot, mostly because of the $635 fine, he said.

Sandi Wells, spokeswoman for the County Fire Department, said a two-acre brush fire Wednesday in a canyon near Camarillo Heights did not grow bigger because area homeowners had cleared their brush. That fire could have burned about a dozen large homes, she said.

“We always preach weed abatement, and this could have been disastrous without it,” Wells said.

The fire was the sixth small brush fire reported since the fire season started May 16, she said.

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Times Community News reporter Holly Wolcott contributed to this story.