DIRT YARDS MAY BE BANNED PALMDALE LAW WOULD REQUIRE LANDSCAPING.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

PALMDALE - Palmdale residents who let their front lawns turn into bare dirt may be soon facing the wrath of city government.

With Antelope Valley's high-desert climate prone to freezing grass and shrubbery every winter and burning them up each summer, city officials are thinking about a law aimed at those people who give up the battle and irritate their neighbors who have well-tended landscaping.

``I went to a lot of meetings with residents in the last (council election) campaign and it was probably the No. 1 issue,'' Mayor Jim Ledford said last week. ``They are concerned about the yards with the 2-foot-tall grass or the ones with weeds or dirt in the front yards.''

The mayor added: ``I'm not looking for something that has a manicure standard, but we need something that's better than dirt yards.''

City Council members are considering a proposed zoning ordinance amendment requiring single-family homes on lots of less than an acre to install front-yard landscaping within 18 months. Homes on corner lots would be required to install side yard landscaping as well.

The amendment would also order property owners to keep up their lawns: establishing an eight-inch height limit for grass and requiring proper watering, weeding and pruning.

City officials haven't yet suggested what penalties might face property owners or tenants who fail to fire up their rototillers or lawn mowers.

That's an issue for the city attorney and code enforcement to deal with, said John Mayfield, chairman of the city planning, which recently approved the zoning ordinance amendment.

The amendment still must be heard by the City Council, perhaps as early as its Feb. 21 meeting.

The ordinance's requirement for front-yard sprinklers shouldn't be a problem for homes built in the 1980s or 1990s, when front-yard sprinklers were a universal requirement in new tracts. But many homes in neighborhoods built in the 1950s don't have sprinklers, officials acknowledge.

The city might want to look at ways to help owners of older homes install sprinklers, Mayfield said.

``We want an ordinance with teeth, but we also want to help the homeowner with the financial burden,'' Mayfield said.

Besides banning both dirt front yards and weeds, the proposed amendment also would bar property owners from planting certain trees - mostly water-thirsty varieties - including cottonwoods, eucalyptus, willows, Siberian elms and tamaracks. Forbidden trees already in yards wouldn't be ordered removed, however.

The forbidden-tree list has two purposes: preventing problems that have occurred in other communities from tree roots cracking sidewalks and damaging plumbing lines and encouraging the planting of vegetation that will survive Palmdale's cold, dry climate.