CLEANING UP CAPE GIRARDEAU: AREA RESIDENTS PROTEST SHABBY PROPERTY NEAR MAY GREENE

Don Howard pointed at neglected property out the window of his home at Ranney and Linden streets Wednesday afternoon.

Walk down the streets near May Greene Elementary School and you'll see modest white-frame houses with neatly trimmed lawns. Some have gardens, some backyard swings, some fenced-in areas for dogs.

But a few have piles of junk.

The piles of junk have Donald Howard and some of his neighbors aroused. Howard, who lives at the corner of Ranney Avenue and Linden Street across from the school, took a petition around to some neighbors asking city inspectors to force four neighbors to clean up their yards and asking for a vacant house at 509 rear Linden to be torn down.

Ten people signed the petition, which reads in part: "We are tired of the smell and the eyesores. We maintain our property. Why can't they?"

Howard said he would bring the petition before the Cape Girardeau City Council Monday.

Two members of the council were working on fixing up that neighborhood Wednesday morning. The councilmen, Tom Neumeyer and Melvin Gateley, met with seven others at City Hall and started the process of taking an inventory of the May Greene area. Only one of the nine present lives in the neighborhood.

Volunteers plan to walk down every street in an area bounded by West End Boulevard on the west, William Street on the north, the Southern Expressway on the south and the Mississippi River on the east. Gateley and Neumeyer gave the volunteers instructions with routes to walk and forms to fill out that would alert the group to problems at specific addresses. The forms have a checklist that includes junk, trash, overgrown yard, abandoned auto, abandoned house, missing house number, and paint peeling.

Over the next month the group plans compile the information and, in early August, meet to develop a plan of action. The volunteers did not take enough forms to cover all the streets.

Howard and his neighbors already know of problems.

The house at 509 rear Linden sits empty and padlocked with old tires, broken storm windows, sheet-metal siding, rusting 60-gallon drums, ruined foam insulation, firewood and a microwave oven with a shattered window in its front yard.

Glenn Reynolds, who lives across the alley from the house, said he has seen rats, oppossums and racoons there. "The other day I saw a black snake come out of that house," Reynolds said. "It stretched half way across the alley."

Reynolds and Howard said they have filed complaints with the city about the house.

Richard Murray, inspection services director for Cape Girardeau, said the city has inspected the yard and given the owner until July 10 to clean it up. He said the complaint said nothing about the house so inspectors have no authority to look into it.

Cape Girardeau's minimum property maintenance code only allows inspectors to act on complaints, and only tenants, invitees or patrons of commercial property or residents living within 200 feet of a property can complain. Complaints are not anonymous, so the neighbors of a nuisance building could be scared to file one.

Neighbors don't have legal standing to file a complaint about the interior of a home unless they have been invited in.

Murray said that unless the owner has a good excuse -- like being hospitalized -- he will be fined if the property isn't cleaned up by the deadline.

Another common complaint in the neighborhood is "neighbors who hold pretty loud parties with cussing," Reynolds said. "You can't even sit out on your front porch without listening to it all the time."

Stephen Franklin, who lives down Ranney from Howard, said most of the neighborhood's problems can be traced to "one or two individuals."

He said that when he complains about loud music, the kind that makes you "feel the vibrations on your floor," police take more than half an hour to respond, "and by then it's shut off."

"The officers respond very slowly to anything of that nature," Franklin said. "The city's given me the impression they don't care."

Gateley and Neumeyer said they are out to prove that the city does care.