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The Garden Gnome

This story begins with a happy ending.

Friends and neighbors have appreciated Jean Dickson’s front yard garden at Crescent and Parkside for years, but never before this week had it drawn such an illustrious stream of city officials. First James Comerford, deputy commissioner for economic development, permit and inspection services, came by for a look; then Gary Ziolkowski, the city’s chief building inspector; then Commissioner Rich Tobe, their boss. Finally, about eight o’clock on Tuesday night, Mayor Byron Brown stopped by, unannounced, and rang Dickson’s bell. He apologized for the trouble she’d had since last summer, when a neighbor’s complaint launched a series of visits and confusing dictates from a city housing inspector, who returned this summer and recently told her that he was sending her to housing court.

The mayor told Dickson that he liked her garden, and that Tobe, Ziolkowski and Comerford had agreed it was up to code. She would not have to appear in housing court, face hefty fines or dig up the beautiful beds of wildflowers and flowering shrubs she has cultivated over the 10 years she’s been living in the house.

Now, the background: Last summer, someone—and we’ll get to the question of that person’s identity shortly—called the Mayor’s Impact Team about Dickson’s garden, complaining that it was overgrown and unsightly. Dickson learned of the complaint when she found Gene Fronczak, a city housing inspector assigned to the Mayor’s Impact Team, snooping in her backyard. “I thought maybe he was casing the house for a burglary or something,” Dickson says.

Fronczak told her there had been complaints about the yard. He told her it looked like a bunch of weeds. “I said, ‘It’s not a bunch of weeds, it’s a garden.’ So he said, ‘Well, what’s that over there growing on the wall?’ And I said, ‘That’s euonymous.’ He pointed to something else, ‘Well, what’s that?’ I said, ‘That’s rose of Sharon. That’s highbush cranberry, that’s a mountain ash tree, those are peonies.’”

She identified chokecherry, which yields beautiful white flowers in the spring, and the Kentucky coffee tree that the city planted in her yard. Hers does better than the others lining the street, maybe thanks to the organic fertilizer she uses to compensate for the salt left behind when the city plows snow and ice onto her property in winter.

Fronczak told her she faced a $750 fine if she didn’t come up to code. He told her she’d receive a letter outlining her violations. When the letter came, it said she had to remove “overhang” and “overgrowth.”

“I didn’t know what that meant,” Dickson said. “If he just said, ‘Cut the grass shorter, ‘that would be clear.” She called her lawyer, Daire Irwin, and the two met with Fronczak, who told her to make sure nothing overhung the curb, to delineate the garden beds more clearly with paths and generally to keep things tidy. Dickson complied and Fronczak seemed satisfied, until he returned this July and again cited her for overgrowth. She responded with a second round of efforts to bring the garden into what she thought he would call compliance, but on his return visit, Dickson says, he told her he was sending her to housing court.

Dickson began to feel that this was not a question of code violations but of harassment, and many of her friends and neighbors agreed. Spree editor (and rabid gardener) Elizabeth Licata blogged about Dickson’s garden at gardenrant.com; Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society librarian Cynthia Van Ness posted the story on Buffalo Issue Alerts, the listserv she manages. The mayor and Rich Tobe began to receive emails and phone calls about the situation. Tobe jumped on the problem and brought about a quick resolution.

So the story reaches its happy conclusion. But why did it happen? In a cash-strapped city with thousands of vacant and dilapidated buildings in neighborhoods devastated by crime, neglect and poverty, would a housing inspector spend so much time on a front yard garden whose only sin is that it is a slightly unconventional, but hardly revolutionary, departure from the standard carpet of domesticated grass?

And why such a quick effort in the top ranks of city government to curtail Jean Dickson’s harassment, once the story began to escape the block and draw attention citywide?

Probably, say most people who know the story, because they suspect the complainant was Deputy Mayor Steve Casey, who moved into a house across the street from Dickson last summer, not long before she discovered Fronczak in her backyard.

Casey has denied to Tobe that he complained about Dickson’s garden or instructed anyone else to, but at least four of Dickson’s neighbors assume it was Casey, who told one of them that he didn’t like Dickson’s garden and or her music. (Dickson plays guitar and sings with friends most Monday evenings, mostly folk, bluegrass and blues.) In 10 years on the block prior to Casey’s arrival, she had never received anything but praise for her garden.

Tobe says the complaint was made directly to the Mayor’s Impact Team, not to the Mayor’s Call and Resolution Center, the normal avenue for citizen complaints; Tobe could find no record of the complaint, so he could not determine if it was anonymous.

If it was Casey—who this summer complained publicly that city inspectors ought to make better use of their time—why’d he do it? Maybe he simply doesn’t like Dickson’s yard, and maybe their aesthetic differences are aggravated by her politics. In addition to wildflowers, signs occasionally pop up in Dickson’s front yard: anti-casino signs, for example. This summer she put up a sign for Delaware District Councilmember Mike LoCurto; it was stolen the night before the primary and replaced with a sign for LoCurto’s opponent, Jessica Maglietto, the candidate that Brown and Casey supported.

Dickson she’s had few interactions with Casey, and he didn’t come over with mayor on Tuesday night to clear the air, but he’s never approached her to complain about the garden or the music.

If Casey’s name was attached to the complaint, thus compelling Fronczak to make a mountain of a molehill, then he misused his office. If he lodged an anonymous complaint, that’s his right, and he’s only guilty of being a poor neighbor and wasting city resources. And he’s not the only one guilty of that. Since January 2006, Tobe says, his department has received more than 15,000 citizen complaints. He says 10 to 15 percent of those are motivated by disputes between neighbors. The key, he says, is “to separate out the motive from the facts”; why someone calls in a neighbor’s crumbling chimney doesn’t determine whether the chimney needs fixing. Many complaints are, however, both petty and specious, leaving less time for street-by-street, comprehensive code enforcement, which, coupled with resources to support rehabilitation, has greater effect on a neighborhood. But complaints are quantifiable and demand attention; that same CitiStat report makes much of the department’s strides in closing cases initiated by complaints. Complaints are also a political tool. More time and greater resources would not have protected Jean Dickson from Steve Casey or some other garden gnome.

“I always wanted not to have grass I wanted to have garden,” Dickson says. “I think it’s an advantage, not an eyesore.”

geoff kelly