Ursula Rushing takes pride in her home on Crestridge Drive in Killeen, but next to her is an abandoned house that stands out with high grass, a collapsing fence and an unkempt appearance.
That property has been abandoned for nearly five years.
She’s been living in the same home since 1972 after moving from San Antonio when her husband was assigned to Fort Cavazos, then known as Fort Hood. Her husband passed away 20 years ago, but she has been keeping up with her property.
“I take pride in my property because that’s the way I was brought up,” she said Thursday as she sat in one of her rooms for an interview with the Herald.
Rushing said she didn’t have problems with her neighbors initially, but then in 2019 somebody started renting out the house next door.
“I started having problems with her and constantly reminded her, please cut your grass, keep your area up, and she wasn’t very interested in it,” Rushing said. “She was a single female all by herself. And she claims she bought (the house) through the VA for almost nothing.”
But then Rushing said there was an incident with the Killeen Police Department one night. She doesn’t know what happened exactly. And after that, the woman apparently moved some furniture out of the house, moved out of the area and left the house abandoned. That was back in 2019, Rushing said.
And the house has been sitting there unoccupied ever since.
Rushing said the grass has not been cut in the summer during the growing season and nobody has been looking after the property. She said at one point the neighbors were chipping in for upkeep on the grass, but gave that up at some point.
“And so that’s when I started getting involved with code enforcement and wanted to know what are the options,” she said. “What can Killeen do, because this not helping my property and the other neighbors around here who are trying to take care of their yards and their homes.”
She said two years ago, code enforcement came out and called the property owner’s phone number and told her she needed to take care of her yard. The woman did come a month later, Rushing said, and took care of the yard, but that was apparently the extent of her involvement. Rushing also said somebody came down and cut the grass in March of last year.
But she is most concerned with the value of her property going down because of the abandoned house next door, and she says her neighbors share the same concern.
“What if we die and our heirs want to sell it?” Rushing asked. “Half of the stuff they won’t get because of something like this. Who wants to walk in there? Because the inside … She destroyed the inside because she worked without permits or got professional people to come and do it … I just want to know what the city going to do because calling your code enforcement folks and letting them know, go out and check — they do the same thing, they go check what it is and then, I guess, if they have people, they come and let them cut, but that’s not a solution. That’s a one-time deal before somebody else complains again.”
Rushing’s situation appears to be an extreme example of a problem that is costing the city of Killeen money in terms of lost revenue and out-of-pocket costs through property maintenance, according to a recent internal audit report from the city of Killeen.
That audit report, released in May and worked on by City Auditor Matthew Grady, detailed approximately $58,000 in lost property tax revenue from 37 tax delinquent properties and $200,000 in unreimbursed maintenance costs for code enforcement.
City Manager Kent Cagle said in an email Tuesday that the city of Killeen wasn’t losing money.
“There are properties on the tax roll that have no commercial value and will never generate tax income,” Cagle said. “If a property is being mowed by code enforcement, changing the classification of the property to a park and having it mowed by city park staff won’t suddenly result in new revenue to the city.”
Councilman Ramon Alvarez, who is the chair of the Audit Committee, said in an email Wednesday that he also agreed that the city of Killeen didn’t lose $260,000.
“Only 58k was quoted by Mr. Grady as lost property tax revenue. Which can it be really be “lost” if it was never collected? I don’t believe so,”Alvarez said.
Grady in a phone interview Friday did characterize it as a financial loss.
“There’s two issues financially,” he said, explaining the losses come from the fact the city was losing revenue from not being able to collect on potential property tax and that the city of Killeen was not being reimbursed for out-of-pocket costs for maintaining those abandoned properties.
Thirty-seven properties were cited in Grady’s audit report as abandoned, but city officials don’t believe the problem is very large comparatively speaking.
“Almost every city has a problem with old and dilapidated property,” Cagle said. “The older and larger the city, in general, the larger the problem. Ours is nothing out of proportion and when compared to Waco, a smaller city, the City of Killeen issue is actually smaller.”
Grady appeared to agree, but nevertheless he still concluded that it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
“It’s not a massive problem. There aren’t hundreds or thousands of properties, but there are properties just laying out there. And there are properties laying out there for decades,” Grady said.
Rushing’s issue is somewhat indicative of the problem code enforcement has been having with keeping up and maintaining these abandoned properties.
“It would be hard for them to keep up a constant presence and they’re largely complaint driven in terms of violations that they respond to,” Grady said. “When we went around and looked at the properties, a lot of them had been abated at one time but the grass had grown back and debris had grown back. And it’s tough.”
A possible solution that is recommended in the audit report is a land bank-type program where the city of Killeen negotiates the sale of abandoned properties, in what Grady calls the Waco Model.
“There’s a lot of creative solutions to it. Some of these properties are just not marketable properties. The solutions are just to negotiate a direct sale,” Grady said. “Or to turn it into a pocket park if it’s viable. Some of these are nice lots. Those are ones that we should really focus on.”
But the land bank solution appears, at least at the moment, to be popular. Mayor Debbie Nash-King said recently that she supports the solution, though it wasn’t clear when it would go before the Killeen City Council.
Alvarez likewise said he was in support of the idea.
“Landbanking is something I have advocated for in the past. Cities like Waco have used these tools established by the State to help address this very issue,” Alvarez said.
Grady said it was his idea to do an audit on abandoned properties as a follow-up to a previous audit he did on outstanding liens.
“If they don’t pay, we file a lien and it goes through the court process and at that point, it becomes an outstanding lien. So it was during that audit I touched on the abandoned property issues,” he said.
He stressed that he is an independent voice in the city of Killeen’s government. “I come up with the evidence and I come up with my own conclusions,” Grady said.
Rushing said that she lives in one of the older neighborhoods in Killeen. She said she used to serve on the Planning and Zoning board awhile ago.
She said she feels like she might need to contact Councilman Michael Boyd, who she said is her representative for the area, about the situation with the abandoned home. She said he came around to her home when he was first campaigning for office.
Rushing said she and her neighbors still feel pride in their neighborhood. “We all know each other for years now,” she said, explaining that they are all frustrated about what is going to happen with the next door property.
She said it is frustrating for nothing to be done about the abandoned property next door.
“How long are we going to do this?” she asked. “It’s going to cost us money.”
