SAN ANTONIO – “It looks like a jungle outside,” neighbor Karen Falvey says about the abandoned house across the alley.
Neighbors call it embarrassing. The abandoned home has an overgrown front yard, and a back yard that might as well be the dumpster.
The home’s on Park Glen on the northeast side near Walzem and Gibbs Sprawl.
Falvey says she’s complained to Bexar County for years and it’s still not cleaned up so she turned to News 4 for answers.
The back yard is an ocean of trash bags littered with a computer monitor, a broken TV, even a toilet.
"You name it, it's been dumped here,” Falvey says.
She’s fed up with watching the home become a landfill.
"I have seen rats. I've seen snakes,” Falvey says.
Someone even dumped a dog there. She’s taken the animal in, now.
Her fight to clean up the mess started more than two years ago.
"It's just been so aggravating,” Falvey says.
First, she says she called the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.
"Of which they do nothing,” Falvey says.
Then she says she checked with county code compliance.
"They said it would take some time,” Falvey says.
She says she approached the owner.
"Nothing has been taken care of,” Falvey says.
And she tried the health department.
"Not even the health department would come out,” Falvey says.
She even called a private trash company and offered to spend her own money to fix the problem and said she was told the company couldn’t enter private property.
"I do feel like, where is my tax money going? And what is my tax money paying for?" Falvey says.
A Bexar County spokesperson confirmed to News 4 the county’s investigated the property and sent multiple notices to the owner, who lives in California.
Falvey says her solution is to get the county to enforce the alley’s “No Dumping” signs.
"If everybody were stopped and fined $2,000 and had to pay that, maybe we wouldn't see this,” she says while gesturing to the heap of trash.
The county says it will bring the owner to court to get the problem fixed for good.
If this is happening in your neighborhood, News 4 wants to know about it.
Click here to email reporter Emily Baucum.
