STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Neighbors don’t always meet each others’ expectations when it comes to property maintenance, but what do you do when your neighbor is the government?
That’s the conundrum longtime Oakwood Beach resident Robert Rosita is facing at his Mill Road property surrounded by city-owned lots in the Fox Beach section of the neighborhood.
All the properties were part of a state-run buyout program after Hurricane Sandy decimated the community, but were transferred to the city last October, according to property records.
Since then, grass on the properties has been allowed to grow uncontrolled just yards away from a field of phragmites that has seen a series of brush fires over the years.
“If those things start growing over here…forget it,” Rosita said during a May 17 interview. “It’s going to be a fire hazard.”
Rosita also said rats and mice have found a home in the overgrown grass, and that he expects it to be a hotspot for mosquitoes as the weather gets warmer.
What’s more, before the state transferred the properties, it set up an eight-foot fence with a padlocked gate on a lot adjacent to his property making it impossible for him to maintain the grass even if he wanted to.
That fence was one of four the state set up around Fox Beach as part of the property transfer to the city Parks Department.
A spokesperson for the state Division of Homes and Community Renewal (HCR), which oversaw the buyout program, said in November that the state-owned properties in the area had been transferred to the city Parks Department as the buyout program came to a close.
For the four fenced-in properties, the HCR spokesperson said the fences were a condition of the property transfer, and a Parks Department spokesperson said they were fenced off because of encroachment concerns.
Rosita, and three of his neighbors living next to the other fences in the area were part of an ABC News report that highlighted property disputes they were having with the state. All other properties in the buyout program have not been fenced-in.
State officials told the Oakwood Beach residents that parts of their properties in place since before Sandy struck were encroaching on the state-owned land, and that those encroachments needed to be corrected.
Eventually, the state took it upon itself to make some of those corrections, even going as far as digging up about 3 inches of walkway outside resident Connie Martinez’s home. This left her with a damaged handrail on her front stoop that was later repaired, according to the ABC News report.
Rosita sees the fences as a form of government payback for the residents participating in the ABC report, but they’re also against property regulations in the five boroughs where fences aren’t permitted over six feet without a permit.
Typically, the city would take a property owner to court if they violated that regulation, but when the city owns the property, any violation serves only as a notice to correct.
The spokesman said that it had issued a pair of violations to the Parks Department for the fences in December and April, but action has yet to be taken.
A Parks Department spokesman said they’re reviewing possible corrections to the fences, but didn’t answer a series of questions about what they plan to do about maintaining the properties.
Properties that were part of the state program are meant to be returned to nature with restrictions on future development in an effort to reduce future flooding, as required by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funded the buyout program.
Ideally, Rosita said he’d like to see the fences removed and be given the opportunity to buy some of the land adjacent to his property with the understanding that it could never be used for development.
“Let me buy it, take the fence down, [and] I’ll cut the grass,” he said.
