BILLINGS — Weeds have gone wild in Billings this year, with mushrooms and disease popping up in yards all across town with record rainfall.
Many people are having a hard time keeping up with keeping their weeds and lawns trimmed down, and that has the City of Billings Code Enforcement team busy cracking down on the weed ordinance.
“It doesn’t appear as anything has been cut down,” says City of Billings Code Enforcement Officer Tanya Punt as she drives back to a residential property to do a check-in on a weed complaint. “On a normal year, we would average maybe two to three weed cases a day. It seems like now we are averaging eight to 10.”
The city says safety is an issue with overgrown yards as the weeds can dry out and become a bigger fire hazard.
“You worry about obstruction of right away when you have weeds growing over a sidewalk,” says Punt.
The city has opened 576 nuisance weed cases so far in 2023, compared to 159 in 2022, and weed season doesn’t end until the end of September.
All property owners are expected to comply with city code, meaning weeds and grass can be no taller than 12 inches.
“We’ll give them 10 days to get the property into compliance,” says Punt.
When property owners or their mowers stall out and miss the deadline, the city’s mowing crew is called in.
“If we don’t get any sort of response, or if the property is still in violation as far as the weeds go, we’ll come out for a final inspection, take updated pictures and then send that off to our parks department to send them over to get it cut,” says Punt.
It’s more costly than doing it yourself at around $90 an hour with a one-hour minimum.
Visible overgrown weeds also hurt home values. Without getting too far into the weeds, it’s one reason real estate agents are filing many of those weed complaints.
“When we have a listing and we have a lot that looks like this, which the weeds could be above my head almost, it is a problem,” says Krista Whitfield, a real estate agent with Canzell Real Estate. "Buyers want to see what the subdivision looks like and when they are starting to see this, then they are looking at, ‘Why is it not maintained?’ So the value of the person’s home that’s by the lot, they are not getting the most value out of their house.”
It's a perplexing problem and one that Billings rarely sees, with too much water and too many weeds after a month for the record books.
