Editor’s Note: This story has been updated from an earlier version to include comments from H&O owner David Mahler.
As predictable in a Baton Rouge summer as are heat and afternoon thunderstorms, so, too, is the annual challenge the city-parish Department of Maintenance faces trying to keep up with cutting the 1,000 linear miles of grass throughout the parish—a problem made even more difficult because the department is also responsible for mowing grass on state-owned property alongside the interstates in Baton Rouge.
The situation was so bad last year that the city-parish decided to hire a private contractor this summer to tend to the 600 acres of interstate grass so the chronically understaffed Department of Maintenance could concentrate on cutting everywhere else in the city-parish.
To that end, the Metro Council earlier this year approved a $162,000 contract with local company H&O Lawn Care to do the work. The firm, which has some $500,000 worth of other contracts to maintain parish-owned property, was the low bidder among several.
“This isn’t a silver bullet,” said Department of Maintenance Director Chris Burnett at the time. “But it will be a huge help.”
On the contrary, city-parish officials say H&O hasn’t been keeping up with the work. Interstate grass has gotten so overgrown that Department of Maintenance crews have been diverted away from grass cutting in other parts of the city-parish to do what H&O should be doing.
“I’ve been fighting this for weeks,” says Jay Ruffin, landscape division manager for the Department of Maintenance. “They’re not doing the job they were hired to do. I’ve spoken to them almost every day. They have told me they didn’t realize it was such a big job and that the grass is really thick.”
Ruffin says H&O has cut only about one-third of the grass it is responsible for in the past two months. Last week, the department initiated a formal complaint against the firm and sent it a notice of deficiency, the first of three it must issue before it can terminate the contract.
H&O owner David Mahler says the job is more difficult than his firm initially realized, but he says he has been in daily contact with Ruffin’s office and has not received any notice of deficiency. He says though the contract was awarded at the beginning of the summer, it wasn’t until July 1 that his firm received a work order to begin cutting the interstate grass. Since then, it has mowed grass along I-10 and I-12, which took longer than anticipated because it was in such bad shape, and that before his crews could even get to I-110 the city-parish called him and said it would take over that portion of the job. He blames the problem, in part, on the poor condition of the grass when his firm took over.
“We are having to weed eat, cut ditches, and do everything the city was not doing prior to us taking it over,” Mahler says. “It is a learning curve. There is no other excuse, and that’s not an excuse. It’s a fact.”
Ruffin says H&O is in compliance with its other city contracts and does a good job keeping grass trimmed in other parts of the city-parish. He says privatizing grass cutting, in general, has been effective for the department except in this instance.
In the meantime, with parish work crews picking up the slack for H&O, other areas of the city-parish are being neglected and some council members are losing patience. Councilman Trae Welch spent one morning last week driving around his district to take pictures of the most egregious examples of high grass, which in some spots is so tall it poses a safety hazard to motorists, he says.
“This is totally unacceptable,” says Welch, who plans to show off his pictures at Wednesday’s Metro Council meeting in order to call attention to the issue. “If this contractor didn’t have the ability to do this work we should not have hired them.”
Mahler says he has a meeting later this week with Ruffin to try to resolve the situation.
—Stephanie Riegel
