TOLEDO, Ohio — Landlords are the focus of a mandate under consideration by Toledo City Council which would put more pressure on them to make sure homes are taken care of during evictions.
"Landlords, property managers, have the responsibility to empty the place out, but they empty it out and just put the trash on the street and it's unacceptable," said council member Nick Komives.
Komives said he wants to combat this issue with a new regulation.
"We don't have a mechanism at the moment to hold the landlord responsible outside of taking them to court and going through a very long process and people don't deserve to look at trash for that long," he said. "We're going to look at things like perhaps requiring a dumpster during an eviction, maybe making sure that the landlord is responsible for just not leaving it on the curb but instead taking it directly to the landfill."
Residents of a street in south Toledo affected by trash buildup want to see action taken, too. Monique Brown says there are two homes on the road where piled-up trash has become increasingly concerning for more than a month.
"This is very unacceptable for us. I'm very disturbed by coming out and seeing this every day," Brown said.
She worries it could cause injuries, too.
"I hope it'll be picked up by next week because it just seems like when people ride by they come and just throw extra garbage," Brown said. "They feel like it's a garbage can and I just feel like they need to come and do something about it immediately."
Another resident, who did not want to speak on camera said the trash is attracting cats and rats.
While Republic Services is typically responsible for bulk pick-up when move-outs like this happen, Komives said the trash must be bagged and thrown out in a specific way for the company to pick it up.
However, if it is not picked up by Republic Services, that then leaves the city's urban beautification department to pick up the mess instead of performing other tasks like leaf collection.
"While we have them out and they're cleaning up other things, we just ask them to also clean up these properties in the meantime," Komives said. "What it does mean is that our residents who are expecting other services that should be done by urban beautification are just happening at a slower rate because we have problem property owners?"
Komives said he's planning to come up with a solution sometime in January.