And that letter will be phase one to get the island cleaned up. Town Manager Andy Hyatt spent half a day driving down every street, taking notes and pictures of properties that need to be cleaned up. Here’s the plan.
While this letter has been discussed for weeks by Mayor Dan Allers and by Hyatt as recently as last week, it appears it isn’t quite ready to fire off. When we asked for a copy of the letter, Fort Myers Beach Town Clerk Amy Baker told us ” The contents of the letter are still in the discussion stage at this time.”
Eventually the town will have to start cracking down on property owners who are simply ignoring the mess they inherited from Hurricane Ian. Some residents of the island are starting to get frustrated that they are doing everything they can to take care of their plot of land, while others haven’t done a thing.
You don’t have to travel up and down too many side streets on Fort Myers Beach to find homes that still need to be demolished, debris still sitting untouched, and now weeds and high grass being ignored. There are also commercial properties up and down Estero Boulevard that are in the same shape they were in nearly a year ago.
The town council does understand that there are property owners that are mired in insurance hell, or waiting for the state to get to them to demo their homes. Everyone is in a different phase of recovery. The letter will help the town establish an inventory of who’s in what phase of cleaning up. The most pressure will be applied to those who are simply doing nothing.
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