WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Mayor LaRhonda Patrick says she wants the City of Warner Robins to get back to the basics, and that includes community clean-up.
The city is rolling out a new initiative and just appointed members to a new blight task force.
Louise McBride is one of the board's nine members. She, as well as many other people, describe the northside of Warner Robins as old.
"The houses are old," McBride said. "I love the old brick homes and I want to keep them up."
That's because many of them aren't being kept up. McBride has been trying to fight blight in the city for years.
"We found out the needs of the city, but we didn't do anything about it," she said.
In 2019, the city under another administration, conducted a blight study.
"It showed that we need to work on people's yards with trash and junk in them," McBride said.
It said vacant buildings and junk cars were huge problems as well.
"A lot of them are rental property, but they still need to be kept up. If the people in the houses aren't gonna do it, the people they are renting from need to," she said.
The city's blight task force will work on ways to hold these people accountable while looking at other solutions to blight.
"They will do out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to policy, but also identifying buildings that need to be torn down," Mayor Patrick said.
On top of that, she says they will schedule community clean-up events.
Patrick says this all helps with larger city development, too.
"All of those areas being focused on for blight only helps uplift the commercial circle area," Patrick said.
By this time in 2024, Patrick says she'd like to see a major change in Warner Robins blight.
"I want to see the majority of areas that have already identified, over 50% of that resolved before the end of the next calendar year," she said.
Patrick says she'd like the task force to meet at least once before the end of the year to plan for meetings and events as they enter 2024.
The public will be able to attend meetings when they begin.