HILLSBOROUGH, Fla. — Anastasia Timofeyeva is under ongoing orders to mow her lawn and this time Hillsborough County really means it.
Code inspectors have been to Timoveyeva’s home at 2026 Gregory Dr. in the University community near USF a total of 42 times since 2008 in response to neighbor’s complaints about the waist-high weeds, garbage and occasional dead animals that attract blowflies to her property.
Every visit costs about $82 according to Hillsborough Code Enforcement Director Ron Spiller. That doesn’t include the cost of hearings by a Code Enforcement Special Magistrate to adjudicate Timofeyeva’s citations, the latest of which took place Friday morning.
That’s hardly a bargain in anyone’s book considering that Timofeyeva could probably pay a neighborhood kid $20 to cut her modest-sized yard.
The case has become a revolving door of violations and compliance that Spiller says should now stop under a new policy of researching violation histories and invoking ongoing orders of ongoing compliance rather than having officers return time and again to write homeowners another citation for doing the same thing.
Folllowing years of frustration over Timofeyeva’s unkempt home, neighbors reached out to 8 on Your Side on Tuesday for help. A Hillsborough County code enforcement officer responded within hours and by Thursday Timofeyeva had cut her lawn and picked up the garbage that had been festering in the weeds for weeks and perhaps even months.
All it took to make that happen was three more visits by a code inspector at a taxpayer cost of about $246.
