You can imagine Shela Barker's frustration when she received a notice from the city this week that her home is a public nuisance because of the dead lawn out front, and that she was being assessed $931 in fees as a result.
Standing in the yard of her home in Sacramento, Calif., Barker could point down the street to another home with a dead lawn. Two doors down in the other direction is another. A few doors farther down is yet another.
None of those, however, is listed on the city's Web site as being in violation of Sacramento's landscaping policies.
"Isn't that hilarious?" Barker asked. "That just drives me nuts."
Barker has been dealing with the issue since May, when someone complained to the city that her lawn was dead and in violation of city codes. The 33-year-old attorney let the lawn die intentionally, planning to replace it with drought-resistant landscaping.
She had read a July story in The Bee about an east Sacramento couple who faced a fine for a similar plan, and how the city backed off the fine because of public outcry about such policies during a drought.
Barker figured her plan to install new landscaping that requires much less water would pass muster, too.
But it took a series of phone calls and e-mails to the city before Barker received assurances that she will not have to pay the fines outlined in a Sept. 5 letter from the city.
That letter informed Barker that the city had, in essence, placed a lien on the home she has owned for the past 10 years: a $746 fine for the lawn, another $100 title fee and an $85 "termination fee" to clear the matter from the county recorder's records.
The city added helpfully that if she wanted to appeal the matter she would have to pay a $400 fee to get a hearing.
All this because she wanted to save water and look out on a yard like the ones in her desert hometown of Tucson, Ariz.
Thursday morning, when The Bee called city code enforcement director Max Fernandez about Barker's case, Fernandez said she was in the clear.
"I talked to her (Wednesday) and she sent me her plans, so we're just going to let her go ahead and do it," Fernandez said. "There's no money owed now."
A few minutes after Fernandez spoke, Barker received an e-mail from him telling her the case was closed.
Part of Barker's difficulty may stem from the fact that her landscaping change has taken longer than she expected.
After receiving notice of the complaint in May, Barker started her dealings with City Hall, calling and writing and calling again until it was agreed that she would start work on the landscaping by August.
But she was placed on disability Aug. 6, she said, "so a lot of the work I can't physically do right now."
Barker hopes to be off disability by the end of this month and to start the transformation of her brown yard.
Fernandez said his department does not want to stand in the way of people putting in drought-resistant yards, but that his department has to respond to complaints from neighbors about dead lawns. Many of those complaints stem from foreclosures.
"You've got to look at the other side," Fernandez said. "The neighbors are probably frustrated that nothing's happening. We're in the squeeze on this.
"But we're working with our people to look at ways to get through this drought and have the right mindset. We can train our code enforcement people to look at it differently.
"It's the people we have to educate that, hey, rock gardens and cactus gardens are OK."