An East Garafraxa resident is wondering why the township has been unable to enforce a clean-up of "an eyesore" in a small estate residential subdivision, and Mayor Allen Taylor is in total agreement that something needs to be done.

But the township does not have a property standards bylaw — although it does have a nuisance bylaw — and neither its laws nor Dufferin County's would apply to the source of the complaints.

Ian Rasmussen, who has lived on Brookhaven Road for the last three years, says the weeds at No. 18 on his crescent off B Line had grown so tall this summer that "you could have grown marijuana plants in there and no one would have known" and "so high that visibility was impaired."

Mr. Rasmussen says he and some of his neighbours called the township offices and the deputy mayor but they had no success in getting the township to take action. They were left with the impression that neither the council nor the staff had any interest in the situation.

Not so, says Mayor Taylor. Lacking a bylaw, he said, the township urged the developer of Brookhaven to exert pressure on the builder to clean up the yard and complete construction of the house.

"The weeds did get cut once," he said. When told that Mr. Rasmussen himself had done the cutting, the mayor seemed taken by surprise. "We were kind of patting ourselves on the back for getting action," he said.

Mr. Rasmussen said he and his neighbours are paying anywhere from $6,000 to $9,000 in taxes annually. Given that burden, "it's pretty sad when you have to pay someone to look after someone else's property."

Yes, it is a sad situation, said the mayor. "I feel bad for the people who have to look at it every day." If there were derelict vehicles or rubbish scattered about, or the house were falling down, there would be a law." But with the provincial ban on pesticides, the township could act only if there were noxious weeds or a threat to agriculture.

Neither Mr. Rasmussen nor the mayor could understand why the house in question has sat unfinished for several years.

"It's gonna be a nice house but it's just not completed. It looks abandoned," said Mr. Rasmussen.

"I don't understand someone putting a couple of hundred thousand into it and just leaving it," said the mayor. "If it were mine, I would either complete it or sell it to someone who would."

Well, then, if there's no progress on construction, surely the township can cancel the development permits? No, he said, so long as there's an effort (however small) to complete the construction, he said, the township's hands are more or less tied.

Possibly. But Mr. Rasmussen says, to his knowledge, there is no work whatever going on at No. 18, and hasn't been for some time.