It’s an all too familiar story — neighbors with similar yard upkeep live on opposite sides of the city limits, so one receives a citation, while the other is left to go about their business.

On Thursday, the Troup County Board of Commissioners discussed a plan to coordinate with the City of LaGrange to educate and enforce ordinances in neighborhoods that straddle the line between the city and the county. Officials from code enforcement, the marshal’s office, the office of planning, zoning and permitting and the City of LaGrange have all been involved, according to Assistant County Manager Eric Mosley.

“There are a lot of areas where we go out and address an ordinance issue, and one side is Troup County [while] the other side is the city,” Mosley said. “They are like, ‘What about him?’ And [we have to say,] ‘I’m sorry, he’s in the city.’ We don’t want to discriminate. We want to make sure we spread this out county wide and really work in those [Quality Development Corridors] areas, where we are really trying to develop these corridors to attract visitors and businesses to our community.”

Mosley said that the City of LaGrange agreed to partner with the county on education and enforcement. He said efforts to educate property owners on ordinances will likely begin this week.

“We are hoping to begin a community cleanup initiative primarily around some of the state and county ordinances that we feel like really need to be addressed,” Mosley said. “Initially, we are going to go out and do some focus education and work in our [Quality Development Corridors]. We are going to work hard to begin to address some of the signage issues, the outside storage, the junk vehicles — just some of the more common ordinance violations that we see.”

Mosley said that initially the focus will be on citizen education on local ordinances.

Commissioner Lewis Davis asked if Hogansville and West Point had been given the option to participate in the effort. Mosley said that they had not yet been contacted on Thursday, but he said he would contact them to see if they would like to take part.

“We are going to have to do this on a regular basis,” Mosley said. “We are talking about quarterly doing these focused outreaches, and of course, Hogansville and West Point can be involved in later iterations of this. I’ll definitely reach out to [West Point City Manager] Ed [Moon] and [Hogansville City Manager] David [Milliron] to hear their ideas, and if they would be interested in being part of this overall county wide cleanup.”

Commissioner Morris Jones asked about the progress of enforcing the county’s updated sign ordinance. Mosley said that the enforcement of the ordinance was nearing the end of a grace period and will soon be enforced more strictly. Jones asked that officials be “gentle” when enforcing the new sign ordinance. 

The Troup County Board of Commissioners will meet again on Tuesday at 9 a.m. at 100 Ridley Avenue.