Residents Complain Eyesore Is Stinking Up Their Neighborhood

Gross to look at, hard to walk by, and when the wind blows anyone in the area inhales a nauseating whiff.

“It’s an eyesore,” Richard Schulmeister, who lives along Mulberry Street in central Las Cruces, said.

Some residents said their neighbor’s yard has looked like a landfill of cacti for quite some time. They said February?s deep freeze made the bad situation even worse.

“Ew, you know, this is disgusting, look at this, it stinks,” Brooke Roberson, who lives in the neighborhood, said.

Roberson said she is sick of walking past the decomposing mess.

Piles of mangled, rotten cacti litter the yard and are creeping onto sidewalks.

“Gross, and you don?t want to smell it; you want to be as far away as possible,” Roberson said. “It’s just disgusting.”

The smell from the rotten cacti is nauseating, Roberson said, best described as a scent similar to that of rotten food.

“That is not how our community should look,” Roberson said.

And the rest of the neighborhood does not look like that. Neighbors said they’re worried the unkempt yard could also lower the values of their pristine properties.

“Could get a big caterpillar and bulldoze it all down ha ha,” Schulmeister suggested.

Dorothy Delosh, who lives next door to the property, defended her neighbor.

“If they don’t like the looks of mine or hers they can always look that way,” Delosh said. “Does it bother me? No… it’s not my business.?

ABC-7 knocked on the property owner’s door to address the situation but no one answered. The owner could also not be reached by phone since we were told she is currently living out-of-state.

Delosh said she does not see the condition of the yard as a problem.

“No, I don’t, because when she gets home she’ll take care of it,” Delosh said.

And that is exactly what city codes enforcement officers said is going to happen.

“We have addressed it,” Vince Pettes, a codes enforcement officer, said. “She was contacted. She’s in California. Because she’s in California, we were able to get in contact, and she was given a chance to come back into town at the end of April and clean it up.”

Pettes said the property owner will not be cited if she cleans up her yard by the end of this month. But if she fails to do so, she could receive multiple citations, which may include sidewalk obstruction, trash, and creating a general nuisance.

But some neighbors said the situation should have never gotten to this point.

“It’s disturbing that the city let it go this long,” Roberson said.