OIG: In Cutting Weeds On City-Owned Property, Department Of Streets And Sanitation Is Not Living Up To Its Own Goals
CHICAGO (CBS) -- An audit released Thursday by the Chicago Office of Inspector General found that the city's Department of Streets and Sanitation is failing to meet its own goals for cutting weeds in a timely fashion.
Streets and Sanitation is responsible for cutting weeds that grow higher than 10 inches in the public way, as well as city-owned and private vacant land. The process is that ward superintendents examine their wards visually, respond to complaints, and direct contractors to mow the weeds.
The problem of overgrown weeds is most serious on the city's West and South sides, and failure to mow the weeds in those areas affects efforts to combat blight, the OIG said. Neighbors and aldermen have repeatedly complained about overgrown weeds in the city.
The OIG's audit determined that Streets and Sanitation does not meet its own goals for timely weed cutting, and identified several specific problems.
Firs, the OIG said, there is no reliable list of city-owned properties that require mowing, and thus, the department cannot effectively manage city-owned vacant land.
The department is also unable to assess its own performance on responding to weed-cutting complaints because its data system is not up to par, the OIG said.
In 2019, there were 5,265 erroneous citations – nearly 25 percent of the 22,295 weed cutting citations for the whole year – which wasted the resources of both Streets and Sanitation and the Law Department, the OIG said.
The OIG recommended that the Department of Streets and Sanitation work with the Department of Law and the Department of Planning and Development to put together a complete and accurate inventory of city-owned properties and give it to weed cutters.
Ward superintendents should not be saddled with the whole responsibility of providing information on overgrown weeds, but should be responsible only for identifying sanitation nuisances and responding to complaints, the OIG said.
The Department of Streets and Sanitation agreed with all the recommendations and is already implementing corrective actions, the OIG said. For the 2020 weed cutting season, the department is providing its contractors with weekly lists of city-owned lots to mow and continues to issue tickets to private land owners who let their properties become overgrown, the OIG said.
Streets and Sanitation also plans to work with the Law and Planning and Development departments to help improve the city lot list – by such actions as having ward superintendents provide other departments with information about vacant properties to aid in figuring out the owners.
CBS 2 reported back in November on one South Side property that was plagued with overgrown weeds and other problems.
Neighbors told CBS 2's Tim McNicholas the 7100 block of South Champlain Avenue was burdened by blight – having racked up more 311 complaints for abandoned buildings than any other block in the city over the prior year and a half.
There were at the time at least six boarded up houses on the block, many of them surrounded by unkempt lawns and empty beer cans. We found one specific lot that was overrun with unkempt trees, overgrown grass and trash, and which was owned by the city.
A deputy commissioner of the city's Planning and Development department told CBS 2 at the time that city-owned lots are "not subject to the municipal code provisions involving the maintenance of privately-owned lots."
But we checked back a couple days later and lot was not just cleaned, but drastically improved. The city had cut down many of the trees and weeds.