The Jefferson County court system utilized community service workers to help clean this property which belongs to Vietnam veteran who was unable to do the work for himself. (Photo Provided)

Toronto county court Judge Lisa Ferguson knew the Vietnam veteran who had been cited into her court for allowing his house to become a public nuisance didn’t have the money to pay someone to clean it up for him and he wasn’t physically able to do the work himself, and she wasn’t about to send him to jail for it.

“He didn’t have the money and it wasn’t appropriate,” Ferguson said. “Jail was definitely not appropriate.”

So, she huddled with Jefferson County Assistant Prosecutor Shawn Blake, Health Commissioner Andrew Henry and the county court’s probation officers and arranged for community service workers to do the heavy lifting for him.

Community service is a way for offenders with court costs and fines they can’t pay to meet their obligations. A sentencing alternative, it allows low-level offenders to work off the penalty the court imposes for their misdeeds without having to go to jail, sparing taxpayers the burden of hefty incarceration costs and teaching them life skills.

“In my now 2.5 years (with the health department), that was actually the first case for a public health nuisance complaint that actually made it to the court level,” Henry said. “We don’t want them to have to go to court to begin with — we want to be able to deal with it at the health department level–we have a three-strike policy before we go to court, anyway, and we don’t want to bog down the court system. But if it does get to that level, we want to make sure it’s addressed.”

The property in question was the source of numerous complaints, officials said.

Henry said “years of neglect and hoarding” brought the homeowner into his department’s sightlines: Weeds and brush had taken over, and there was “open dumping of garbage” on the front porch and around the perimeter of the property, as well as junked vehicles that were filled with boxes.

“We don’t want to make someone a criminal over (something like) this, we just want them to create a healthier environment for their neighborhood,” he said.

Henry said the homeowner’s physical limitations were a factor.

“If the person is fully capable of cleaning up their property, they need to do it,” he said. “But he was a veteran with physical limitations, and that’s why Judge Ferguson looked at it a little different than someone who has the capability to do it for themselves. We’ve had a couple of other instances where maybe it’s a widow whose husband died and he’d taken care of all the yardwork … there’s a different level of compassion for that than there is with someone who is taking advantage of the system.”

Blake said it was an unusual situation.

“There’s a limit to what the department of health can do to clean up properties, and once it reaches the court level for a charge to be filed — which is a last resort, we don’t want it to get that far — the health department always tries to help people clean up the property to the extent it can,” Blake said.

Blake said they offered the use of community service “as a possibility, and he agreed to it.”

“Community service couldn’t go in and clean someone’s property without them allowing it to happen, but it worked out,” Blake said. “It’s a success story — the end goal is not to find people in contempt or fine them, but to get the property cleaned up. If the person is willing to allow community service workers onto their property to help with the problem, then it works. But if they’re unwilling to allow that, and it’s completely within their rights, then we can’t do it.”

At the same time, he said they “utilized community service to clean it up the way he wanted it to be cleaned up, he had a say in what was cleaned up.”

“I’m just happy it ended well and that everyone was happy,” Blake said.